junk bond trader

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

Hunter S. Thompson (American, 1937-2005)

(Source: anneyhall, via fuckyeahexistentialism)

"Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

(Source: wordsfrombooks)

"That’s it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not."

The Seagull

(Source: becomedarkness, via russkayaliteratura)

"It’s important not to be embarrassed by your past. The contradictions are part of what we are."

Richey Edwards

(Source: the-cult-of-richey-edwards)

"Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes."

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

(Source: bookoflead, via proustitute)

"I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; They are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second.They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it."

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

(Source: fuckyeahvirginiawoolf, via prologue-to-history)

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

Friedrich Nietzsche

(Source: ageofreason, via valentine-anthems-that-kill)

"To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. […] Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life - that is the important thing."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

(Source: ihavelostmymindintheprocess)

"To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer."

Jonathan Franzen for The New York Times (via gracebello)

(via libraryland)

"All men can know themselves and control themselves."

Heraclitus

(Source: fuckyeahexistentialism)

"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison."

C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

(via bookoasis-deactivated20120227)

"The most common form of despair is not being who you are."

Søren Kierkegaard

(Source: illuminatedbeing, via human-voices)

"Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me."

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

(Source: wordsfrombooks)

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."

Martin Heidegger

(Source: areyouentertained, via fuckyeahexistentialism)