Existentialism Quotes

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 ...

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of s...

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - ...

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give signifi...

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able ...

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon t...

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powe...

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so ti...

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering ...

HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn't know.HAMM:What? What didn't you know?NAGG:That...

CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never li...

(About Sartre...)His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is ...

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled al...

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in sol...

Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadnes...

All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted...

Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the wor...

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who ...

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the re...

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of thei...

The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Pr...

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the ris...

In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist ...

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water...

God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities y...

A normal existence - what could be more irrational? It's fantastic the number of things you're force...

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming...

I hadn't known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others aroun...

(…) symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like ...

What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is t...

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What?...

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificanc...

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘w...

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in t...

If this had not been the case with Abraham, then perhaps he might have loved God but notbelieved; fo...

But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the ...

Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and s...

I am poor—you are my riches; dark—you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own...

Come, sleep and death; you promise nothing, you hold everything.

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life...

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees an...

It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialecticalconsequences inherent in...

Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect fo...

When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when ...

You are a hater of activity in life; quite right, for before there can be any meaning in activity, l...

Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.

Battle day and night against the guile of oblivion...

It is the thought, not the incidentals of expression, that essentially makes an exposition unpopular...

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I ne...

If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a...

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it...

Death is the ultimate negative.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, ...

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by...

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did b...

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintanc...

We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of...

Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things...

Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. Th...

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technolo...

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation...

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human ...

Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he find...

Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe...