Existentialism Quotes - Page 5

His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).

Viktor E. Frankl

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.

P.G. Wodehouse

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation

Franz Kafka

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Tom Stoppard

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

Raymond Carver

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

Rabih Alameddine

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

Rollo May

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

Rollo May

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

Albert Camus

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

Werner Herzog

Nothingness haunts Being.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

Philip K Dick

All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?

Bertrand Russell

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

Tom Stoppard

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera.

Benson Bruno

Afternoon experience: autographing exposed legs, outstretched in lines like matchsticks. Afternoon epiphany: Those with smooth, hairless legs would soon lose all evidence of my contact when the sweat causes the ink from the marker to run. I am ephemeral. Skepticism would be the reaction to those with thick leg hair, as their curls frazzle the lines of my name outward illegibly. Among the scaly-legged, I flaked off immediately, like I never was at all.

Benson Bruno

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Anton Chekhov

The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I want my name to mean me.

Mark Haddon

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment...

Jean-Paul Sartre

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

Albert Camus

After awhile you could get used to anything.

Albert Camus

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

Friedrich Nietzsche

You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.

Friedrich Nietzsche

– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing; most people, expect that in adulthood things will get better. During the early years of adulthood the future still looks promising. But inevitably the mirror' shows the first white hairs and confirms the fact that those few extra pounds are not about to leave; eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body...' Where's all that money I was to have made? Where are all of the good times I was going to have?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

William Faulkner

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.

William Faulkner

As joy dwindles with the yearsI wistfully recallWhen the christmas treeLooked ten feet tallAnd the presents under itSeemed endless And more Than mere wrapping paper.

Justin Wetch

The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit. And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.

Simone de Beauvoir

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

William Barrett

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

Albert Camus

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre

That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?''Yes' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Information paints no picture, sings no song, and writes no poem.

R.F. Georgy

We have an infinite supply of information and yet we cannot read.

R.F. Georgy

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

Albert Camus

No more dreamin about the whole adult gig,We’re no longer burnin’ toward nothing, dude. tJust well on our way on a mythical ship, which no longer touches Land. God Bless the Cap’n.

Alexej Savreux

I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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

Albert Camus

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

Albert Camus

A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross.

Therese Doucet

Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.

Søren Kierkegaard

Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity.

Abhijit Naskar

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

Cormac McCarthy

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.

Cormac McCarthy

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?

Cormac McCarthy

I kissed her and forgot death.

Jeanette Winterson

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves.

Neel Burton

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Existentialism Quotes - Page 5

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