Alienation — Philosophical Quotes
There's a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people and feeling like none of it connects to you. Kafka knew it. His characters wake up transformed into insects, stand trial for unnamed crimes, wander castles that refuse to acknowledge them. Fromm saw the same disconnection in every shopping mall and office park. Marcuse watched a whole civilization get comfortable inside its own cage. The word for all of it is alienation, and it hasn't gone away.
27 quotes from 14 voices: Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Søren Kierkegaard, Günter Grass, Václav Havel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rollo May.
- “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convi...” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
- “A man without hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little conn...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolut...” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simult...” — Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
- “The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love, is the source of ...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?” — Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be?
- “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happeni...” — Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- “Hell is other people.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
- “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness ...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
- “The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one ...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
- “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” — James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
- “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced ...” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in...” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- “The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have ...” — Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation
- “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
- “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quie...” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
- “Believing and devouring — a peculiarly German process.” — Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
- “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings t...” — Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
- “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meanin...” — Václav Havel, Letters to Olga
- “I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver h...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
- “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” — Rollo May, Love and Will
- “Anxiety is not something we have but something we are. It is our state of bei...” — Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
- “The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience ...” — Rollo May, The Courage to Create