Existentialism Quotes

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I...

By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me.

...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed...

There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to ref...

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the mea...

Nothingness haunts Being.

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if ...

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, tur...

There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the exten...

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt ...

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for th...

[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a...

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibi...

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

There is no reality except in action.

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towar...

You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think tha...

Ama bardağımın dibinde biram ılıksa, aynada koyu renkli lekeler varsa, fazlalıksam; en içten ve en k...

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the ...

Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these pat...

I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But ...

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from th...

You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not...

I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've...

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's sol...

Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never k...

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that qu...

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and s...

I kissed her and forgot death.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the ...

A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was him...

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failutre that his life must appear to be. He had wa...

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been t...

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note t...

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, ...

Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." An...

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they n...

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowle...

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly ...

That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who ...

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. ...

[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in ...

I've told you two things : First, you're much more insignificant than you ever imagined and second, ...

Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know ...

But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot wo...

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at t...

Human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond bein...

Human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond bein...

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets ...

The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided ...

Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal...

The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned to us; it is the certitude of the...

I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Ha...

In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice—he cherishes all ...

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them ...

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in...

The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?

And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain ...

Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.

Leave nothing for death but a burned-out castle

The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth wh...

Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Par

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.

The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one t...

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unl...

Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes ...

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to inve...

the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up...

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and ...

The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous,...

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is...

They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ...

We are children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corrupti...

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.– The sign of doo...

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out...

I am a mask, concealing the real.

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for w...

That's the existential problem," Fat said, "based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unabl...

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal s...

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine t...

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the...

All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach ...