Top 100 Quotes About Existentialism
#1. Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.
Scarlett Thomas
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
Miguel De Unamuno
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
#14. 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
#15. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
#19. A person is what he says and does; that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.
Orson Scott Card
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected
James Wright
#23. I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
#27. It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#28. 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
#29. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#30. You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.
This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.
Kristen Henderson
#31. I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.
Kahlil Gibran
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
Nick Harkaway
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Andrew Sean Greer
#44. Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
David Eagleman
#49. 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
#50. I Think, Therefore I Am ... I Think ...
David Ski
#51. 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
#52. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Ernest Becker
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth ... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.
Steven L. Peck
#67. How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.
Andrew Sean Greer
#68. You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.
Albert Camus
#74. Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#75. From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#76. What's the point? There is no point. That's the point!
On the joys of existentialism.
John Tarttelin
#77. HAMM:
Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
NAGG:
I didn't know.
HAMM:
What? What didn't you know?
NAGG:
That it'd be you.
(Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
#78. 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
#79. You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#80. Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
Rollo May
#82. The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
Anton Chekhov
#84. You are nothing but what you think. That is existentialism.
Debasish Mridha
#85. Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
Cornelia Funke
#86. 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.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#87. 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
#88. The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.
Colin Wilson
#89. The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#90. After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.
David Mitchell
#91. You know, everything's a sort of lie, and then you die.
Arthur K. Flam
#92. 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
#93. Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.
Paul Tillich
#94. Little Newt snorted. "Religion!"
"Beg your pardon?" Castle said.
"See the cat?" asked Newt. "See the cradle?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#96. 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
#98. The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Ernest Becker
#99. 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
#100. If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Albert Camus
