Existentialism Quotes

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.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

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.

The point is there ain't no point.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

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

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.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

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.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

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.

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

Words are loaded pistols.

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.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

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.

Death is a continuation of my life without me.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

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

Nothingness haunts Being.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

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.

I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

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

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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.

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.

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.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

Everything is true, and nothing is true!

Existentialism is possible only in a world where God is dead or a luxury, and where Christianity is dead.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.