Existentialism Quotes

In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.

When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsibl...

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to w...

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; realit...

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I w...

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; an...

The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fa...

You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with li...

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself...

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I shou...

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civiliza...

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that t...

Time is only linear for engineers and referees.

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of c...

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrough...

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with ...

It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body i...

New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts.

It’s maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets...

After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.

The law of karma says that no matter what context I find myself in, it is neither my parents, nor my...

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life...

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest p...

We are gods with anuses.

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and fai...

In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my ch...

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whateve...

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whateve...

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of u...

The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all ...

Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the d...

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our l...

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a mom...

But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartle...

No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the c...

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a mom...

Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom...

The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there...

You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in ...

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch up...

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stan...

I ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,—but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble,...

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different g...

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and ...

If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond” – into nothingness – one h...

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it...

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole – there exists ...

Pure logic is the impossibility by means of which science is maintained.

Existentialism” is a thinkingThat no longer wishes to think; this means the destructionOf the true t...

I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appea...

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death sup...

At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember y...

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer cho...

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by crippli...

There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical curr...

All kinds of things are happening to me." I begin. ,,Some I choose, some I didn't. I don't know how ...

I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and...

The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely ...

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people...

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a w...

To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung ther...

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while th...

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that le...

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense ...

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the pro...

Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really...

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.