Top 100 Quotes About Existentialism
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#9. What's the point? There is no point. That's the point!
On the joys of existentialism.
John Tarttelin
#10. You are nothing but what you think. That is existentialism.
Debasish Mridha
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#15. Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
Delmore Schwartz
#16. One of the most refreshing ideas to come out of existentialism (perhaps the only one) is that we are free to interpret and reinterpret the meaning of our lives. You
Sam Harris
#17. Modern Existentialism ... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.
William Barrett
#18. My favorite word is existentialism. I can't say it and I'm not quite sure what it means.
Geri Halliwell
#19. Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.
Stanley Elkin
#20. Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man ...
Jean-Paul Sartre
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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.
Viktor E. Frankl
#25. 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
#26. There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals. (1949)
Gyorgy Lukacs
#27. Concerning Existentialism, I've heard many persuasive arguments; however with infinity in every direction, including time, what I don't understand is why I won this crapshoot.
Hank Bracker
#28. Existentialism is possible only in a world where God is dead or a luxury, and where Christianity is dead.
Gabriel Vahanian
#29. 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.'
Craig Ferguson
#30. After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.
Richard Brautigan
#31. Where Gnosticism regards the world as demonic and hostile, existentialism considers it natural and indifferent.14 In short, Jonas is far less intent than Voegelin in making Gnosticism modern.
C. G. Jung
#32. The difference between structuralism and existentialism is simple: the world-constituting 'I' of existentialism is displaced by the linguistic relation between signifier and signified.
Stephen Trombley
#33. ...not positive about the definition of existentialism but it seems like the opposite of nihilism in which case I suppose I may be.
Autumn
#34. We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.
Terence McKenna
#35. Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
Norman Mailer
#36. I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.
Woody Allen
#37. Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Anita Brookner
#38. The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism. It is part reality and part nightmare
Martin Esslin
#39. 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
#40. Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.
Scarlett Thomas
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
Miguel De Unamuno
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#49. 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
#50. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
#52. 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
#53. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.
Jim Holt
#57. A person is what he says and does; that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.
Orson Scott Card
#58. 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
#59. We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected
James Wright
#60. I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Tom Stoppard
#64. It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#65. 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
#66. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.
Jason Daniel Chaplin
#67. You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.
This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.
Kristen Henderson
#68. I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.
Kahlil Gibran
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
Nick Harkaway
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
#77. 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
#78. Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Andrew Sean Greer
#79. Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
David Eagleman
#84. 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
#85. I Think, Therefore I Am ... I Think ...
David Ski
#86. 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
#87. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Ernest Becker
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.
Steven L. Peck
#100. How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.
Andrew Sean Greer
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