Best 642 quotes in «existentialism quotes» category

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

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.

I just look around and say, I'm a mess. I don't know why I do things.

Let us do something, while we have the chance! ... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

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.

Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

My favorite word is existentialism. I can't say it and I'm not quite sure what it means.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

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.

Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

A bad girl is a myth. Every female exist in the world is equally awesome . You call them bad because they do not act the way you want. You are jealous of the girls who choose freedom over mental slavery.

A Chinese proverb: Outside of sky there is sky, outside of people there are people. It is the idea of infinity and also that there will always be someone better than you.

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.

A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.

(About Sartre...) His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.

After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.

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.

A human being will rarely admit this to you, but they tend to be terrified of living forever. They were born and raised with the understanding that their lives would end. They've achieved everything they wanted to achieve, all the ills that plagued them. And now boredom is their only enemy. And they get up in the morning and fight it every day of their eternal lives. Recreation and play sustain them. Football sustains them. And if you find yourself in a football game that's such a gargantuan task, that seems undefeatable, that will claim eons of your time and your passion? I think that makes you one of the lucky ones.

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure-as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

Ağaçlar arasında bir ağaç, hayvanlar arasında bir kedi olsaydım, bu yaşamın bir anlamı olurdu, daha doğrusu bu sorunun hiç anlamı olmazdı, çünkü dünyadan bir parça olurdum, oysa şimdi tüm yakınlık gereksinimimle onun karşısındayım. Öylesine önemsiz olan bu us, işte beni tüm evrenin karşıtı yapan bu.

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

All kinds of things are happening to me." I begin. ,,Some I choose, some I didn't. I don't know how to tell one from the other any more. What I mean is, it feels like everything's been decided in advance - that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense od who I am. It's as if my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch. Oshima gazes deep into m eyes. "Listen, Kafka. What you are experiencing now is the motif od many Greek tragedies. Man does not chose fate. Fate chooses man. That is the basic world view of Greek drama. And the sense od tragedy - according to Aristotle - somes, ironically enough, not drom the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I am getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex being a Great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of lazines or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.

All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.

All religions are man-made; God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.

All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?

all the existentialists concur that it is through our choices that we become who we are.

A farmer can toil harder when a respite is promised at the end of the day and a feat at the end of the year. In the same manner, a human can live ferociously because death is promised at the end. “Teacher, what do you mean by the feat and rest? What is the relationship between?” The teacher answers, “forgetfulness, of every labor and sweats, and of himself in that condition.” Winter becomes bearable by the presence of forthcoming greens, marriage by children, letters by knowledge, urban by nature and canticle by beauty.

A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show and you wonder why he is alive.

aku telah melakukannya"--kata ingatanku. "aku tidak mungkin telah melakukannya"--kata kesombonganku dan tetap tidak tergoyahkan. akhirnya--ingatanku menyerah

Always know the shape you take—know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.

Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.

And it's always better, isn't it, when you discover answers on your own?

And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!

And then, whatever you yearn for may indeed become a weakness or an open wound... if you make it the only standard by which you live your life.

And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.

An erupting existence craves character mutation as salvation for the alter ego.

Anita felt like she finally understood why love was symbolized by the grotesque pumping organ, always threatening to clog, or break, or attack. Because the heart was the body's engine, and love was an act of the body. Your mind could tell you who to hate or respect or envy, but only your body--your nostrils and your mouth and the wide, blank canvas of your skin--could tell you who to love.