Existentialism Quotes - Page 2

That's something we all want to know, isn't it? Is there a "purpose" to our form and substance? Or are we simply the random result of billions of years of chemical reactions and accidents influenced by pressures from the environment?..."-Jules, BOOM

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.

Jason Daniel Chaplin

This existenitalist stuff sure is crap

Daniel Younger

If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

Thomas Nagel

The problem with happiness is that it’s a difficult thing to detect. It’s discreet and serene by definition. Just when you think you’ve found it, it’s likely just a spark of euphoria, as quick and fleeting as fireworks. Human beings are therefore doomed to feeling happy without knowing it or experiencing brief and unstable glimmers of euphoria. There aren’t many people who have the tantric ability to fully experience happiness, detached from the bliss of euphoria.

Andre Averbug

He’s a typical existentialist. And that’s a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

Johnny Rich

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neithersterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain,in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man'sheart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy

Albert Camus

I relish my life. It’s the one I have. It’s difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it’s mine.

Marya Hornbacher

...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?

IRVIN D.YALOM

I was dead for a billion of years and in a few years I will be dead again. I'm not conscious of that state of lifelessness which was before I came to life. And I'm not sure about the lifelessness that is yet to come. Life is only a station between these two states. It is a chance to experience and to do something, the only chance known with certainty. The major issue is to find what is worth living for, but an even greater issue is to find what is worth dying for. We all die anyway.

Huseyn Raza

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.

José Ortega y Gasset

When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsible for what we are, what we do, I say yes!"The affirmative echoed around the woods. The dog pricked up his ears. This man has no one to talk to, thought Inni."But when he then asks me to be responsible for the world as well, for others, I say no! No. Why should I be? 'When man chooses himself, he chooses all men.' Why? I have not asked for anything. I have nothing to do with the vermin I see around me. I live out my time because I have to, that is all.

Cees Nooteboom

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament—the presentiment of death and awareness of life—and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure-as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

John Williams

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

James Baldwin

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

Stephen King

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn’t a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was…anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would l look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknés, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.

Jean-Paul Sartre

That stage in life when older people assume that just because you've graduated college you know who you are, or what you're doing, and in fact most people don't.

Kim Gordon

Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust.

Sōseki Natsume

The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.

Colin Wilson

We can't even resist making antimatter, so what makes you think we are going to leave cloning technology untapped? (Douglas Parsley)

Alan Chains

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

Sōseki Natsume

our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush growing by the side of the mountain and hangs on to it for dear life. The bush is laden with wild strawberries that hang tantalizingly near his mouth. As the tiger snarls above his head and a gorge stretches beneath his dangling feet, the man takes a bite from a luscious berry. ‘How sweet,’ he exclaims as he relishes its taste.I do not remember the moral attached to the fable. It might have been a commentary on the ephemeral nature of life, on how foolish it is to imagine that there is happiness to be found in the world when death is certain and likely to happen at any time. Or it might have been an exhortation to seize the day and squeeze the most out of every moment, for, in any case, we areall going to die. It might have made a reasonably good ad for strawberries, which were so good that you simply had to eat them, even if it was the last thing you did.

Indu Muralidharan

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.

Paul Bowles

We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.

W.H. Auden

You didn't succeed. Well, what of that? There's nothing to prove, you know, and the revolution's not a question of virtue but of effectiveness. There is no heaven. There's work to be done, that's all. And you must do what you're cut out for; all the better if it comes easy to you. The best work is not the work that takes the most sacrifice. It's the work in which you can best succeed.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility.

Milan Kundera

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

We shall have thousands of Shatovs to deal with

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.

Haruki Murakami

The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite.

George Ainslie

But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about things," Anthony suggested. "All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self—just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course," he went on, "once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss—that is, if you're sensible. Like me," he added, smiling.

Aldous Huxley

We are children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.

Peter Atkins

There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals." (1949)

György Lukács

A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.

Ivan Klíma

Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, head, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.

Dagobert D. Runes

I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and now, wouldn't exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The present world wouldn't exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist—just as this world would no longer exist for him.

Haruki Murakami

Life is short and evasive. This shortness and evasiveness of life is not predicated on numeric quantifiers, but embedded in the limitation on humans as mere mortals.

Prinx Maurice

In trying to explain life we have reduced it to a series of chemical reactions, whether it be the burning of glucose in mitochondria to create energy, or the folding of proteins to make bile, or pollen, or blood. Zoom out to where we perceive things, the titanic mathematics of it all is silent. We have twisted our thoughts and feelings into all sorts of psychological origami about whether these things are a result of evolution, intelligent design, or creation ex nihilo, and for all we know, our little planet is the only place that holds all of this wonder in a void that is too staggeringly huge to conceive.

Sean J Halford

How do you quantify love? Can you weigh it, measure it, pin it down with equations? If the sum of all experiences is really just the interaction of a finite soup of chemicals copulating in nerve endings, how did this even dare articulate the infinite?Mathematicians will tell you there are different types of infinities. Some are countable, some are not. We can love someone more and more; we can stop loving. But we can never guess how much all this is. Love has no units.

Sean J Halford

In your dream you call for Chaplain Charlie. You met the Navy chaplain when you interviewed him for a feature article you were writing. Chaplain Charlie was an amateur magician. With his magic, Chaplain Charlie entertained Marines in sick bays and distributed spiritual tourniquets to men who were still alive, but weaponless. To brutal, godless children Chaplain Charlie spoke about how God is merciful, despite appearances, about how the Ten Commandments lack detail because when you're writing on stone tablets with lightning bolts you've got to be brief, about how the Free World will conquer Communism with aid of God and a few Marines, and about free fish. One day a Vietnamese child booby-trapped Chaplain Charlie's black bag of tricks. Chaplain Charlie reached in and pulled out a bright ball of death...

Gustav Hasford

Existentialism” is a thinkingThat no longer wishes to think; this means the destructionOf the true thinking that constitutes man.The existentialist fanaticsDislocate their brains for nothing — it is only a case ofSelf-delusion and self-promotion.For to think truly means: recollection.Let the fools spin their foolishness.-----“Daseinsphilosophie” — sie ist ein DenkenDes Nichtmehr-Denkenwollens: so ZerstörungDes wahren Denkens, das den Menschen macht.Die Existenz-Fanatiker verrenkenSich das Gehirn für nichts — nur SelbstbetörungUnd Selbstbespiegelung kommt in Betracht.Denn wirklich denken heißet: sich besinnen.Und lasst die Narren ihre Torheit spinnen.

Frithjof Schuon

Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?

Winston Graham

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength

Friedrich Nietzsche

That's the existential problem," Fat said, "based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe's Faust, Part One, where Faust says, 'Im Anfang war das Wort'. He's quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; 'In the beginning was the Word.' Faust says, 'Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat.' In the beginning was the Deed. From this, all existentialism comes.

Philip K Dick

In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom

Simone de Beauvoir

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.

Jean-Paul Sartre

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?

Anton Chekhov

[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?

Jean-Paul Sartre

We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.

Shaun David Hutchinson

In the real journey of life, it is not what you do; it is what you don't do that matters the most.

Harshit Walia

Well, that's not true. I need to work for a living.”“No, that's not true. You think you need to work like this because that's what you've been told. That is merely an idea put into your head. In actuality, you can walk away any time you want.

Dylan Callens

The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never liked fiddling detail; I perceived the general significance of things rather than their singularities, and I preferred understanding to seeing; I had always wanted to know everything; philosophy would allow me to appease this desire, for it aimed at total reality;philosophy went right to the heart of truth and revealed to me, instead of an illusory whirlwind of facts or empirical laws, an order, a reason, a necessity in everything.

Simone de Beauvoir

Anita felt like she finally understood why love was symbolized by the grotesque pumping organ, always threatening to clog, or break, or attack. Because the heart was the body's engine, and love was an act of the body. Your mind could tell you who to hate or respect or envy, but only your body--your nostrils and your mouth and the wide, blank canvas of your skin--could tell you who to love.

Tommy Wallach

Previous 1 2 3 4 … 10 Next

Existentialism Quotes - Page 2

Related Topics