Top 87 Existentialism Life Quotes
#1. They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'
As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.
Paulo Coelho
#2. A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#3. Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
Miguel De Unamuno
#4. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
#5. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#6. Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
#7. Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
Jose Saramago
#8. We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected
James Wright
#9. I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.
Kahlil Gibran
#10. Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time - I doubt whether I am a human being.
Franz Kafka
#11. A series of disconcerting questions nibbles at hearts of troubled youths. These same unanswered questions, along with their acerbic toxins, reveal their pungent fumes more frequently and with greater intensity as a person rushes headfirst into life's concrete jungle.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#12. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#13. This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
Nick Harkaway
#14. If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.
Chloe Thurlow
#15. Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Andrew Sean Greer
#16. Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
#17. I Think, Therefore I Am ... I Think ...
David Ski
#18. What are all the thoughts rattling in your mind when you're not listening to the answers to questions you ask?
-Jo, Boom
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
#19. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#20. I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#21. It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, 'what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
Stephen King
#22. Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
Simone De Beauvoir
#23. We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.
Susan Moody
#24. 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.
Lewis Black
#25. The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.
Albert Camus
#26. Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain - This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
Omar Khayyam
#27. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
Ivan Klima
#28. In this atmosphere of wintry desolation and isolation, this slowly, very slowly increasing chill, my hands and lips started to freeze. Had I extinguished the sun? Had I killed the heart of all life?
Hermann Hesse
#30. In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.
Annie Proulx
#31. Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there's always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.
Albert Camus
#32. I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.
P.G. Wodehouse
#33. The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life-that is the heart of existentialism.
Walter Kaufmann
#35. It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.
David Lynch
#36. Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, head, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.
Dagobert D. Runes
#37. Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.
Abhijit Naskar
#38. -The burden of existence is bestowed upon birth.
-The gift of existence is bestowed upon birth.
Choose wisely, your life (and potential others' life) depend on it.
Kevin Focke
#39. The very fact of being human panics us into the most grotesque play-acting imaginable; and we deal in absurdities to keep life from being a total waste, like one constant jacking-off party.
Hal Bennett
#40. I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.
Rabih Alameddine
#41. Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.
Peter Watson
#42. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.
Oscar Wilde
#43. All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?
Simone De Beauvoir
#45. All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
David Eagleman
#46. No drugs here, no manipulation of neurotransmitters that leaves our worldly problems unattended. And no talking cures because explicit insight is not needed. All that is required is courage: the courage to encounter discomfort and stay with it long enough to be changed by it, strengthened.
Jason Dias
#47. the path your life is stuck on and be free
It's a dark whisper calling to me.
But I'm not brave enough to listen. I'm old enough to know I don't have any special talents. So no matter how depressing... I have to suck it up... And live the life I have.
Inio Asano
#48. If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?
Christopher Bram
#50. How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.
Paul Bowles
#51. God desires that man should be. God does not wish to be alone. The meaning of existence is the conquest of loneliness, the acquisition of kinship and nearness.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#52. I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.
Ohran Pamuk
#53. [in the true mad north] of introspection,
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die, glimpsing in their
dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#54. 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.
Jean Genet
#55. There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#56. It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
David Eagleman
#57. In the real journey of life, it is not what you do; it is what you don't do that matters the most.
Harshit Walia
#58. I found motherhood a crash course in existentialism (what is my purpose in life, am I mistress or slave of my destiny, when the hell do I get some sleep?) and [ the book] ROOM was the result.
Emma Donoghue
#59. There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David Eagleman
#60. If it is death, I am dying every moment. If it is life, I am living every moment.
Vipin Behari Goyal
#61. There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
Soren Kierkegaard
#62. We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening
Zhuangzi
#63. Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we?
Dave Eggers
#64. [Y]ou are here to learn something. Don't try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.
Steven L. Peck
#65. Nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.
Robin Sloan
#67. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
Kurt Vonnegut
#68. That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who you are, or what you're doing, and in fact most people don't.
Kim Gordon
#69. Sometimes it's like that in life too. We look into a past that no longer exists, looking as if it's real. We hold onto things in our life that there's no reason to hold onto anymore because, unlike the stars, they don't bring us beauty, they bring us pain.
Charlene Carr
#70. What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once.
Ashly Lorenzana
#72. Don't worry if you don't accomplish everything in this life. Fortunately, death overcomes every thing - even the very thing that tried to kill us.
Kamand Kojouri
#73. Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
Tom Perrotta
#74. Life has no meaning a priori ... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#76. What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.
Ernest Becker
#77. How did I picture the life after the grave?
I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
#78. CLOV:
Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM:
Mine was always that.
Samuel Beckett
#79. Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
Frank Herbert
#80. Say not: I live today, I shall die tomorrow. Divide not reality between life and death. Say: now I live and die.
Marcel Schwob
#81. I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.
Stephen Chbosky
#82. Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#83. He had stylized himself
life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
Graham Greene
#84. I don't complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.
Fernando Pessoa
#86. We need to start a new philisophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life.
Jandy Nelson
#87. If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
Albert Camus
