Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology “homeostasis”, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
+ mental health + anxiety + existential + existentialism + Viktor Frankl + Man's Search for Meaning + philosophy + goal + life + meaning + srtuggle + strive + challenge + gap + tension + fulfilling + purpose
He who knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.
+ existence + meaning + existentialism + viktor FRANKL + Man's Search for Meaning + meaningless + reason + life + purpose
I became afraid that everyone was wrong - that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be utterly useless, void, and without the shred of a purpose.
+ meaning + life + existentialism + purpose + reason + meaningless + void + vacant + useless + existence + fearful + death
Sometimes I feel like there’s a hole inside of me, an emptiness that at times seems to burn. I think if you lifted my heart to your ear, you could probably hear the ocean. The moon tonight, there’s a circle around it. Sign of trouble not far behind. I have this dream of being whole. Of not going to sleep each night, wanting. But still sometimes, when the wind is warm or the crickets sing… I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for. I just want someone to love me. I want to be seen.
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning.
+ reality + truth + painful + hurt + painful truth + illusions + stories + comforting + lives + meaning + haruki marakami + IQ84 + meaningful
There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
+ meaning + plot + life + purpose + existentialism + admit + people + reason + absurd + meaningless + atwood
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.
+ book of disquiet + fernando pessoa + philosophy + nostalgia + feel + attached + life + reality + anxiety + fear + flight + people + tangible + sickness + mystery + death + meaning + nothingness + sad + disappear + faces + mean + symbolic + time + death anxiety + gone + nonexistent + grief
We toil after goals, most of them—indeed every single one of them—of transitory significance and, having gained one of them, we immediately set forth for the next, as if that one had never been, with this next one being essentially more of the same. Look at a busy street any day, and observe the throng going hither and thither. To what? Some office or shop, where the same things will be done today as were done yesterday, and are done now so they may be repeated tomorrow…
+ meaning + goals + life + significance + point + richard taylor + routine + observe + meaning of life + existential + sameness + nothingness + why
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
+ depression + death + meaning + meaningless + life + living + routine + sameness + everyday + music + boring + incessant + strength + escape + insecure + madness + nothingness + necessity + nothong + being + louis ferdinand celine + philosophy + suicide + pointless + dread + tomorrow + end + earth + destiny + night
It is not our silence that is deafening, but all the words underneath it, yelled in our heads.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
She had seen fear: the terrible helpless fear that rises up out of sadness and despair and is no longer attached to anything - the helpless fear that is tied only to nothingness. Not fear or anxiety or despair about a person or a situation, nothing, nothing, only the exposure, the vulnerability, being cast loose from all certainties, from all dignity, from all love.
+ fear + existentialism + helpless + helplessness + sadness + despair + nothingness + empty + universe + meaning + nothing + anxiety + situation + person + exposure + vulnerable + exposed + certainty + loose + dignity + depression + dread + hans keilson
And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find
And of the shame of never finding it.
+ T.S. Elliot + meaning + meaningless + cured + fulfilling + craving + empty + yearning + longing + find + shame + looking + search + fill + complete + embarrassment + life
