Authenticity — Philosophical Quotes
Everybody performs. The question is whether you know you're doing it. Sartre said we're always choosing who to be, and pretending otherwise is self-deception. Nietzsche wanted people to stop borrowing their values from the herd. Beauvoir showed how women, especially, are handed scripts they never wrote. The struggle to be genuine in a world that rewards performance runs through every thinker here. None of them pretended it was easy.
88 quotes from 23 voices: Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frantz Fanon, Virginia Woolf, Herbert Marcuse, Søren Kierkegaard, Audre Lorde, Rabindranath Tagore, Günter Grass, George Orwell, Václav Havel, Rollo May.
- “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can b...” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
- “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their min...” — Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
- “Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness c...” — Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
- “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Ju...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one w...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One m...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolut...” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invinci...” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a standing in, not a falling...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- “Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need y...” — 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?
- “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the ver...” — Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
- “Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, bu...” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds...” — bell hooks, All About Love
- “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people a...” — bell hooks, All About Love
- “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not beco...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
- “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- “There are no facts, only interpretations.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks
- “How can man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled. The true way that le...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
- “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” — Franz Kafka, Letters to Oskar Pollak
- “There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it can...” — Franz Kafka, The Zuerau Aphorisms
- “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happeni...” — Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- “Existence precedes essence. Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surg...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
- “Commitment is an act, not a word.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?
- “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the port...” — James Joyce, Ulysses
- “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of expe...” — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself m...” — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible ...” — James Joyce, Stephen Hero
- “The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
- “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other ...” — Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
- “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous...” — Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
- “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if t...” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- “The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one ...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
- “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until...” — James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption
- “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot l...” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep ...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
- “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to ...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters
- “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
- “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in...” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
- “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
- “Do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
- “Your silence will not protect you.” — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, t...” — Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
- “If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's...” — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I...” — Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
- “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.” — Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse
- “Writing — I can say this after years of practice — is a lonely business.” — Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion
- “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this inserti...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, riskin...” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
- “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your lonelies...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
- “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothin...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
- “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted...” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is ...” — George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi
- “The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant....” — Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
- “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising t...” — Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
- “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certain...” — Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
- “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their min...” — Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
- “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convi...” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
- “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunc...” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
- “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “The soul is healed by being with children.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
- “I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver h...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
- “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.” — Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
- “Anxiety is not something we have but something we are. It is our state of bei...” — Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
- “Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity re...” — Rollo May, The Courage to Create
- “The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience ...” — Rollo May, The Courage to Create
- “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to ...” — Rollo May, Love and Will
- “The purpose of psychotherapy is not to make people adjusted but to set them f...” — Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
- “Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they...” — Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
- “Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, w...” — Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself
- “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds...” — bell hooks, All About Love
- “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “Whoever has learned to be alone with himself knows only too well how hard it ...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
- “We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
- “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out