Existentialism Quotes

You’re not interested in her because by your definition she isn’t real. But your brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s all just chemicals firing and testosterone giving you a hard-on.

~ Jonathan K. Wade

Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.

~ Johnny Rich

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

~ Graham Greene

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth.

~ Hermann Hesse

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal, that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

~ Saul Bellow

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.

~ Neel Burton

Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

~ Neel Burton

…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.

~ Darrell Calkins

The wreckage of stars - I built a world from this wreckage.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can't help themselves. They don't trust the world around them--it's too good for them, or not good enough--so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives up in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn't like their creation myth, that's all--it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe that story. But the thing is, really, that it doesn't matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn't actually matter where we came from, or where we're going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we're here and how well we do it.

~ Katie Coyle

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

~ Arundhati Roy

It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by somone desperate to prove there's a design to our lives. That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are ore than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that's all they are - if there are no rules governing our lives - then our entire existence is a meaningless farce.

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.

~ Nick Payne

Human freedom brings with it the burden of choice and of its consequences. As humankind is akin to claim for its own special privilege a certain unique destiny not afforded with equal measure to other organisms, so must it further—if paradoxically so—entertain the assumption that, in spite of this glorious determinism, there persists nonetheless a thread of free will—or, at the very least, some vague delusion thereof—woven seamlessly into the tapestry of collective experience. Of course, this conception that destiny is to be forged by one’s own hands more often engenders greater restriction than it does greater extension to the potential of human happiness.

~ Ashim Shanker

Love is a felt force when we become aware of it. Our cognition must be added to the reality of existence. This is the dance of love. We must cultivate our seeds that we plant in each other's lives. Only then we will enlarge our view of love, beauty, creativity, and purpose.

~ Luis Enrique Cavazos

We each possess the ability creatively to respond to the ontological mystery of our existence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.

~ Otto Rank

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

~ Philip K. Dick

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

~ Frank Herbert

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

~ Philip Roth

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.

~ Albert Camus

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

~ Ram Dass

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?

~ Christopher Bram

He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it.

~ Tony Tulathimutte

Life is merely terrible, I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

~ Franz Kafka

We co-existed in peaceful detachment

~ Tsitsi Dangarembga

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

Camus and Henry waved to me from that muddy truck. They both wanted me to get over myself.So, this was me, getting over myself. And it was about time.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…

~ Sean J Halford

She wasn’t broken.She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks.She was always trying to keep herself glued together.But it was hard, she felt too much.No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through,sometimes in drips, other times in floods,She felt everything,the heaviness of the clouds right before rain,the rush of the subway cars as they left the station,the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away,wondering if it was the last time she would see them,the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours.She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky,shedding light on the day,without companion.And she longed to give as much as the sun.If she could brighten someone’s day,bestow warmth were there was cold,make someone smile, give someone hope,then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day,the cracks would fill with loveand the pain would become only a voice,reminding her that her pain was important.She knew how fragile life was, how hard,and how precious.She wanted to feel it all.

~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Tears are a wonderful thing; they wash, they warm, they are the rivers that run through our minds, seeking release. In their salinity they remind us that we came from the sea. Our cells know this, and go about their machinations, ceaselessly recreating the primordial brine. We are water, whether or not the Spirit of God once hovered formless and magnificent above the idea of us, in some ancient place before the Singularity uncoiled itself into space and time.

~ Sean J Halford

No drugs here, no manipulation of neurotransmitters that leaves our worldly problems unattended. And no talking cures because explicit insight is not needed. All that is required is courage: the courage to encounter discomfort and stay with it long enough to be changed by it, strengthened.

~ Jason Dias

There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

They say I don’t exist. They say I am an extension, an indulgence, imagination of a schizophrenic person.

~ Faiz Shaikh

I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.

~ Stephen Chbosky

Sometimes I wish I had not woken up from a beautiful dream, and continued dreaming within sleep upon sleep until I become a dream itself. Because sometimes waking up is more frightening than a nightmare.

~ Danny Castillones Sillada