Top 51 Existentialism Philosophy Quotes
#1. The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.
William James
#2. Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.
Those whom I deemed
Changed to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,
Have aged and lost our old affinity:
One has to change to stay akin to me.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings
Simone De Beauvoir
#4. 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
#5. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#6. To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.
Albert Camus
#7. All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
David Eagleman
#8. 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
#9. Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.
Stanley Elkin
#10. All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.
Roberto Bolano
#11. We can't even resist making antimatter, so what makes you think we are going to leave cloning technology untapped? (Douglas Parsley)
Alan Chains
#14. 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
#15. Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#16. Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.
Jim Holt
#21. Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
Norman Mailer
#22. Sartre turns love into a 'battle between two hypnotists in a closed room'.
Iris Murdoch
#23. [E]very man ought to say to himself, Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?
Jean-Paul Sartre
#24. Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?
Winston Graham
#25. Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.
Neel Burton
#26. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#27. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#28. Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
Miguel De Unamuno
#29. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker Percy
#30. Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.
Gary Cox
#31. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#32. Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
#33. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#34. I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.
Kahlil Gibran
#35. You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
#39. Subconsciously, we all want to be nebula ... In the end, we're all connected. We're all going to become one cloud of light whether you like it or not. We're all made of the same star dust.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#40. Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.
Scarlett Thomas
#41. The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Albert Camus
#42. To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.
Soren Kierkegaard
#44. From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#46. You are nothing but what you think. That is existentialism.
Debasish Mridha
#48. It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
Samuel Beckett
#49. Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.
Albert Camus
#50. 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
#51. The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.
Marshall McLuhan
