Existentialism Quotations

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber.

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.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.

I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

I just look around and say, I'm a mess. I don't know why I do things.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

The point is there ain't no point.

I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

Words are loaded pistols.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.)

Nothingness haunts Being.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

My favorite word is existentialism. I can't say it and I'm not quite sure what it means.

Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.

This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

Apparently there is no profit in the unique, or not enough to make it worthwhile to preserve. Ultimately it drains the life out of us, and existentialism starts to make more and more sense.

Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.

The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Let us do something, while we have the chance! ... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

This work is an attempt to understand the time I live in.

Everything is true, and nothing is true!

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.