Best 642 quotes in «existentialism quotes» category

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.

He realized that time, clocks ticking, everything is just a human-made concept. That clocks didn’t tick back in the times he was seeing now, and he realized that the sun never sets as long as you travel with it, circumnavigating the globe, once every 24 hours. It was a new thought, a new dogma to Jordan, evolving his idea of being more than one at once. It was an idea of being more than one time at once, literally moving along the 4th dimension. Not being pushed to the side, not being pushed up or down, not being pushed inward or outward, but being pushed in one way, without ever moving at all. They were being pushed along the track of time, with no way to go back, with no way to retract and go back to the starting point as they could in any of the three visible dimensions. And it was that thought, Jordan finally realized, that made him exhausted and scared. It was that realization that made Jordan realize that this was the thing Tong was afraid of. That through all his travels on planes and all his moving around the world, he could still go back to Bangkok, he could still go back to the hospital where he was born, but he could never go backward on that track and stand in the same place, only the same location, as where his first day began." -A Spontaneous Existence, Chandler Ivanko

Her nausea increased, the dialect had become unfamiliar, the way our wet throats bathed the words in the liquid of saliva was intolerable. A sense of repulsion had invested all the bodies in movement, their bone structure, the frenzy that shook them. How poorly made we are, she thought, how insufficient. The broad shoulders, the arms, the legs, the ears, noses, eyes, seemed to her attributes of monstrous beings who had fallen from some corner of the black sky.

Her thoughts were like the moon eclipsing the sun.

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

He shuffles atoms and jet of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they - monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer vanishes and are no more when he is not.

He stayed under the fluorescent street light until the sounds of traffic and nightlife faded into silence, and only then did he look up into the night sky, the way he usually did when he was looking for answers.

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.

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.

His absence was a presence. Who knew an empty space could take up so much room.

Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.

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

His thoughts gravitated to the twisty, swirling riptides where he submerged in waters of subzero ruminations. His mind raced around the notion of–– the ultimate subtraction of oneself, and deduction-dwelling inside uninhabitable white.

His primacy of self and willingness to perpetuate his will go beyond death and toward perfection.

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.

Holbrook broke the silence. “All for nothing,” he said. “What’s that?” Farid said. “All the treatments. The pain, the despair. It was all for nothing. She’s going to die anyway.” “I’m sorry, Pete,” Farid muttered. “Sorry again. You didn’t give her cancer, you know? That’s all anyone can say, though. ‘I’m sorry.’ You’re not responsible.” “I’m sorry anyway.” Sarah put a hand on Holbrook’s arm. “Freedom,” she said. “What?” “We’re going to lose anyway, no matter what we do, so we’re free to stop trying to win.” She sat up a little straighter, tugged on her shirt, smoothed out her skirt. “That’s what we’ve been talking about all this time, isn’t it?” Holbrook went quiet again and Farid was afraid Sarah might have alienated him. That’s what happens when you say something true. Nobody can hear it; they turn away from you, looking for a lie that’s easier to bear.

Hope is an all seeing eye that triangles the eternal humbleness in our existence. Hope is what makes us smile through our unwavering faith. When we hope, we organize our details to become conscious citizens of the world.

How is it I have the strength to carry my own weaknesses?

Humanism is naturalism.

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.

Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this - not contradicting, but transcending reason.

Humans are the only helpline that humanity has got.

Hypocrisy is the rule in this world rather than the exception. If a person desires to be free of hypocrisy, they should imagine that everything they do is always being watched and judged by others or in more superb cases, by the person they would like to become.

I always thought I wasn't afraid to die. No... no one is afraid of death itself. Your pain and suffering is over in an instant. What really makes me suffer... Is seeing you crying over me... From the darkness of the Milky Way. I'm sorry... Please don't make that face. You look best shdn you're smiling, you know.

I am naked and a beggar and an atom in the vortex of humanity.

I am Lord God, so are you.

I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And Yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it

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.

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning only through the bond that unites men; however, the urge to achieve agreement with another human being was so hard to satisfy. I was shocked by the lack of understanding, paralyzed, as it were, by every reconciliation in which what had gone before was not fully cleared up. Early in my life and then later again and again I was perplexed by people’s rigid inaccessibility and their failure to listen to reasons, their disregard of facts, their indifference which prohibited discussion, their defensive attitude which kept you at a distance and at the decisive moment buried any possibility of a close approach, and finally their shamelessness, that bares its own soul without reserve, as though no one were present. When ready assent occurred I remained unsatisfied, because it was not based on true insight but on yielding to persuasion; because it was the consequence of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship (in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere of home or countryside). But then came the moments of strangeness, as if human beings lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet nothing seemed more pernicious to me than loneliness, especially the loneliness in the midst of social intercourse that deceives itself in a multitude of friendships. No urge seemed stronger to me than that for communication with others. If the never-completed movement of communication succeeds with but a single human being, everything is achieved. It is a criterion of this success that there be a readiness to communicate with every human being encountered and that grief is felt whenever communication fails. Not merely an exchange of words, nor friendliness and sociability, but only the constant urge towards total revelation reaches the path of communication.

I ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,—but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble, whom bad torture wearieth, and a worse dream reawakeneth out of his first sleep.— But there is something in me which I call courage: it hath hitherto slain for me every dejection. This courage at last bade me stand still and say: "Dwarf! Thou! Or I!"— For courage is the best slayer,—courage which attacketh: for in every attack there is sound of triumph. Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby hath he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph hath he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain. Courage slayeth also giddiness at abysses: and where doth man not stand at abysses! Is not seeing itself—seeing abysses? Courage is the best slayer: courage slayeth also fellow-suffering. Fellow-suffering, however, is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man looketh into life, so deeply also doth he look into suffering. Courage, however, is the best slayer, courage which attacketh: it slayeth even death itself; for it saith: "Was that life? Well! Once more!

I believe for we are.

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

I decided to give up meaningless sex, but then I remembered that everything is meaningless.

I don't complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering.

If all existence is a dialogue, how is it there is still so much left unsaid?

I earned my living by carrying on a dialogue with people I scorned.

If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache.

If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.

If integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching, and there is never a private moment, integrity becomes impossible. What are we left with?

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature, In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuses behind us, no justification before us. We are alone with no excuses. This is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet in other respects is free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

If i was an existentialist, i would probably be French.

If life is supposed to be a theater, then somehow, we all met and played our part.

If one cannot love that, then what can one love? Life? But life is just as ugly as we are.

If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the “Beyond” – into nothingness – one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering.

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine. What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.

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

If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.