1.
If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.
Martin Heidegger
If I accept mortality into my existence, recognize it, and confront it head-on, I will liberate myself from the dread of death and the trivial matters of life - then only will I be liberated to become my true self.
2.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Jean-Paul Sartre
5.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Stanley Kubrick
6.
It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.
Blaise Pascal
9.
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
Albert Camus
11.
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
12.
Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
Delmore Schwartz
13.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
14.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
Albert Camus
15.
I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.
Jean-Paul Sartre
17.
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir
18.
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
Albert Camus
19.
The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
Anton Chekhov
20.
Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.
Friedrich Nietzsche
22.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Joan Didion
23.
One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
24.
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
Carl Sagan
25.
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
David Ives
26.
The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
Soren Kierkegaard
28.
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Ernest Becker
30.
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
31.
I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.
Mike White
32.
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 Dostoevsky
33.
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
34.
All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.
Josh Radnor
35.
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
36.
Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
Jean-Paul Sartre
37.
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
Rose Tremain
38.
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
39.
The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence.
Paul Tillich
40.
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
42.
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
Jean Genet
43.
I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
Bill Watterson
44.
When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
Rollo May
45.
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
46.
You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.
Friedrich Nietzsche
47.
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
Jean-Paul Sartre
48.
One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
50.
Existentialism is possible only in a world where God is dead or a luxury, and where Christianity is dead.
Gabriel Vahanian