quotes about Existentialism
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It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
-- Albert Camus -
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
-- Albert Camus -
This work is an attempt to understand the time I live in.
-- Albert Camus -
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We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
-- Anton Chekhov -
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
-- Arthur SchopenhauerSource : Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. J. Payne (1974). “Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays”, p.299, Oxford University Press
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The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
-- Carl Sagan -
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We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
-- Charles Bukowski -
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
-- David Ives -
Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
-- Delmore SchwartzSource : Delmore Schwartz (1950). “Vaudeville for a princess, and other poems”
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Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
-- Ernest BeckerSource : Ernest Becker (1985). “The Denial of Death”, New York : Free Press
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
-- Ernest Becker -
The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.
-- Friedrich Durrenmatt -
Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche -
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You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche -
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche -
But how could you live and have no story to tell?
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Existentialism is possible only in a world where God is dead or a luxury, and where Christianity is dead.
-- Gabriel VahanianSource : Gabriel Vahanian (2009). “The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era”, p.227, Wipf and Stock Publishers
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
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.
-- Jean GenetSource : Jean Genet (1987). “Querelle”, p.46, Grove Press
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Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
-- Jean-Paul SartreSource : Jean-Paul Sartre (2012). “Essays in Aesthetics”, p.11, Open Road Media
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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.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
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Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
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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.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
-- Jerry Saltz -
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
-- Joan Didion -
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.
-- Josh RadnorSource : "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
-- Martin HeideggerSource : Martin Heidegger (2014). “Introduction to Metaphysics: Second Edition”, p.25, Yale University Press
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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.
-- Martin Heidegger -
It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
-- Matthew Woodring StoverSource : Matthew Woodring Stover (2008). “Blade of Tyshalle”, p.992, Del Rey
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To assume that one's existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.
-- Merold WestphalSource : Merold Westphal (2010). “Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society”, p.35, Penn State Press
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The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber.
-- Michael Mullen -
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.
-- Mike White -
Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.
-- Paul Tillich -
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.
-- Paul Tillich -
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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 -
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
-- Saul Bellow -
Some men become what they were born for.
-- Sheenagh PughSource : "Selected Poems". Book by Sheenagh Pugh, 1990.
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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
-- Simone de Beauvoir -
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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.
-- Soren Kierkegaard -
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
-- Stanley KubrickSource : Interview with Eric Nordern, Playboy, September 1968.
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All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
-- Tom Stoppard -
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
-- Rose Tremain -