"Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is."
"Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe."
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Source: William Barrett (2011). “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”, p.14, Anchor
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"It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last."
"Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread."
"The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived."
"Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself."
"We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures."