Existentialism Quotes

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

~ Tom Perrotta

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

~ Albert Camus

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

~ Albert Camus

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

~ Miguel De Unamuno

Death is the ultimate negative.

~ Tom Stoppard

Time is only linear for engineers and referees.

~ Craig Ferguson

That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day.

~ Gregory Galloway

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

~ Tom Stoppard

Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?

~ David Hewson

It is good to pray even if you do not believe in God.

~ Vipin Behari Goyal

You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Seeing the moving handmill, Kabir wept and said, Alas, no one has survived the pressure of the two millstones (of the heavens and the earth). They left all their mighty empire and pomp and show behind them and but for a handful of dust no trace remains of their existence. Nobody knows about them or about what happened to them after their death -- what insects ate them up and how they fared with God. Thus alone shall one realize that this world is a transitory place and man has nothing to gain from it; it is a puppet show. Thus alone shall one find peace.

~ Mir Amman

The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.

~ Haruki Murakami

We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.

~ Fitzjames Stephen

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

~ Walker Percy

Life’s easy.It’s living it that’s difficult.

~ Mike Sasso

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

~ Albert Camus

Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.

~ Albert Camus

the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.

~ Paul Bowles

The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable

~ Albert Camus

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre