16 Quotes by Michael Szymczyk

Just because we do not expect anything from other people [3.6 Regarding ones dealings with other people: Expect nothing, receive everything.], does not mean that we cannot still give. What we have in excess we should give out like an overflowing river. We should be like Raskolnikov giving his twenty-five roubles to the widow.

If one cannot love that, then what can one love? Life? But life is just as ugly as we are.

Given enough time everything becomes insignificant.

The greatest failure in philosophy has been the failure to realize that despite whatever we may accomplish in this life, given enough time, everything becomes insignificant.

The only fact that man consists in is that he or she is. It is this fact that gives a person significance.

What is becomes what was. It is this fact that, given enough time, makes man insignificant. [1.6 Death makes everything insignificant.]

Imagine: the mind exists isolated in a chaotic wasteland; four white walls, an even whiter ceiling and a floor that has no color surround it. It is this limitation that protects it from the harsh weather of insignificance that lies outside. Over time these walls slowly close in towards the center and when they meet they vanish along with everything else.

Some of the greatest tastes in life are acquired (i.e., the taste for classical music, learning, exercise, solitude). A man should set himself out to acquire good taste. Above all, he should first set out to determine just what good taste is. What in the limited time of this limitation in its totality, that I call life, what will be most beneficent to me as Dasein?

Hypocrisy is the rule in this world rather than the exception. If a person desires to be free of hypocrisy, they should imagine that everything they do is always being watched and judged by others or in more superb cases, by the person they would like to become.