Top 100 Existentialism's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?
Irvin D. Yalom
#5. Fighting for freedom" is a myth. There's only freedom in uniting. You're not really free with an, "Us vs Them" mentality; because you are constantly defending yourself. And in fighting, there's no time for freedom.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#6. 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
#7. In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.
Annie Proulx
#8. Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen ... But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity.
Bertrand Tavernier
#9. The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
Cormac McCarthy
#10. You know, everything's a sort of lie, and then you die.
Arthur K. Flam
#11. Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone De Beauvoir
#12. What's the point? There is no point. That's the point!
On the joys of existentialism.
John Tarttelin
#13. And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
Milan Kundera
#14. 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
#15. A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
Philip K. Dick
#16. When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.
Jerry Hall
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#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. Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Ernest Becker
#22. The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite.
George Ainslie
#24. Well, that's not true. I need to work for a living."
"No, that's not true. You think you need to work like this because that's what you've been told. That is merely an idea put into your head. In actuality, you can walk away any time you want.
Dylan Callens
#25. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#26. 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
#27. Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one" like me remembering the way it could have been. Help me with this barricade. No surrender. No defeat. A spectre's haunting Albert Street. I am your pamphleteer.
John K. Samson
#28. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#29. This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
Raymond Carver
#30. I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#31. That's something we all want to know, isn't it? Is there a "purpose" to our form and substance? Or are we simply the random result of billions of years of chemical reactions and accidents influenced by pressures from the environment? ... "
-Jules, BOOM
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
#32. 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
#33. Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It's a good sentence, she'll like it.
Elena Ferrante
#34. 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
#35. Deep down, it's all baseball, no matter what kind of geometrical shape you play it with.
Vernon D. Burns
#36. With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#37. 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
#38. [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
#39. John Clellon Holmes ... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'
Jack Kerouac
#40. I Think, Therefore I Am ... I Think ...
David Ski
#41. Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.
Cormac McCarthy
#42. He's a typical existentialist. And that's a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.
Johnny Rich
#43. And it's always better, isn't it, when you discover answers on your own?
Veronica Rossi
#44. I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.
Hunter S. Thompson
#46. Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.
Barnett Newman
#47. This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
Martin Heidegger
#49. 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
#50. I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more.
Simone De Beauvoir
#51. To assume that one's existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.
Merold Westphal
#52. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
#53. He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror
John Fowles
#54. I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#55. We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected
James Wright
#56. 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
#57. I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
#58. A person is what he says and does; that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.
Orson Scott Card
#59. Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
#60. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#61. All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?
Bertrand Russell
#62. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#63. 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
#65. Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.
Soren Kierkegaard
#66. There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
Albert Camus
#67. College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#68. People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#69. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days ... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
Simone De Beauvoir
#71. 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
#72. We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.
Shaun David Hutchinson
#73. Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
Miguel De Unamuno
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.
Scarlett Thomas
#78. Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
David Eagleman
#79. 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
#80. The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.
Franz Kafka
#81. At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.
Gertrude Stein
#82. Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
#83. Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Andrew Sean Greer
#84. The sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind ... [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.
Paul Bowles
#85. Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger.
Leo Strauss
#86. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
#87. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable
Albert Camus
#88. 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
#89. That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day.
Gregory Galloway
#90. This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
Nick Harkaway
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.
Kahlil Gibran
#96. You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.
This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.
Kristen Henderson
#97. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#98. The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#99. It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#100. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
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