Existentialism Quotes

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the w...

There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished w...

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.

Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead ma...

You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is ...

Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At th...

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or ...

The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to ...

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about th...

The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the ...

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teach...

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for ...

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is fo...

Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the r...

Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd lik...

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise ...

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it...

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great mora...

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of...

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it

It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and thi...

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helples...

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then...

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great fact...

How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can rememb...

...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their ...

After awhile you could get used to anything.

Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And e...

As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the m...

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely th...

To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive w...

And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thir...

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to...

For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the da...

But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about ...

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a sm...

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken h...

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Mar...

Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards.' In other words suffering is germane to our ...

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time ...

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Existence is tedious, anyway.

Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose al...

The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's act...

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-...

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rathe...

All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of ...

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is...

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched sli...

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...