Best 642 quotes in «existentialism quotes» category

It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.

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.

It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialectical consequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form of problemata , in order to see what a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves off.

It is our goal and new poetics to disappear. We will not disappear into nothingness; we will disappear into everything. As we resist and resist hard, history will remember us.

It is possible that some people are sorry for me, but I am not aware of it.

It is the mark of a common mind to think that everything is for him significant. In a respect he is right, in that moment everything (in terms of the intentionality of his or her consciousness) is significant. The mark of this type of man is that he never looks beyond the moment. If he did he would drown in the sea of insignificance, in the realization that what is, becomes was, and what was no longer has any significance (except for in relation), and what is, given enough time, becomes what was, that is, no more (hence the relation loses significance). If he could realize death he would realize [1.6. Death makes everything insignificant]. He would realize that he is no different than the countless number of people that have come and gone before him, who found their significance, much as he did, in bodily and social pleasures. He would realize this moment which has been given had for him its significance not in its primacy (in the moment itself) but rather in its secondary qualities, that is, the relations to those social and bodily pleasures which he has strived for, he would realize that the moment, which is most significant because it is primary (all else is secondary from it) had been forgotten, and that the life he had been living he had not been living at all. He would realize that what he had hitherto found significant was, given enough time, truly insignificant, and what had always seemed insignificant, the moment itself, was the most significant, simply because without it, there would be nothing. A man’s significance lies in truly living in his moment.

I too am my own forerunner, though I sit in the shadows of my trees and seem motionless.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

It’s maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.

It's not enough to simply "be", what's required is to "be human".

It’s tragic that most of us spend our private lives paradoxically thinking something is watching us and permanently disapproving. We say we believe in benevolent deities but smear them with hate and the power to smite. We see sin everywhere, when the only sin is when we forget to treat each other with respect. That is the sad secret that makes the Universe vulnerable.

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.

It was the first time I realized that I was going to die. I was drowning in the realization that this life was not going to last, that life was one day going to end, and as I began to suffocate in the fear of my own mortality, something happened, the days began to pass. I slowly began to forget in the constant flight of life the one thing that could set me free. My mind turned then to the first time I was in love. But was I really in love? For five whole years I had forgotten myself, my existence in the embrace of another. Love, the river Styx, and a toll we pay so we don’t wander wretchedly this earth in a lonely eternity, watching with remorse the fleeting happiness of others in union. Love, Narcissus, a stream where we fall in love not with another, but in the fact that the other loves us. Perhaps. Love, Fleeting fulfillment of which at the end lies Ceres, heads of a dog that will devour us and leave us stranded in the abyss with a thirst never quenched, but our throats always crying out, dry, for more and more and more. Ich liede Durst. So said Siddhartha. Immer. Toujours. Always And forever, ad infinitum. O Life thou pluckest me out. I guess it doesn’t matter though because, perhaps, that’s just life, and what is true is that for one eternal moment I was in joy…I was the blinking eye wide open which ever widened for more.

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.

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

It would be foolish to be stoical all the time, you'd wear yourself out for nothing

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.

I've lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I've never bitten, I've been waiting, keeping myself for later - and now I've just ascertained that I don't have teeth anymore.

I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.

I’ve whittled my fascination with the cosmos down to this mantra: we can imagine the Universe as a giant void racing away from us at a frightening speed, or it could occur to us that, in fact, it is wrapped around us in all directions. Then, no matter where we are, we are at the centre of something wonderful. And that’s how I’ve always thought about it.

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

I view a piece ‘The Sick Child’ by Edward Munch. At the moment I view it I perceive the intended effect, a certain situation and the emotion it contains. The viewer’s reaction to this will depend on his or her own subjective experiences, that is, if he or she can relate, create a relation between what was (or is) and what is expressed. If he cannot he will walk away to the next painting with a strictly intellectual enjoyment of Munch’s work. If he can (and does) create a relation then the effect becomes affectual. The viewer’s memory activates, he sees the painting, he sees himself, and out of that comes the relation. He remembers what it (the situation, resemblance to situation) felt like and in that relation feels a bond with the painting, a connection. Art is relieving because it makes us feel that we have not been alone in what we have felt.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.

I was dead for a billion of years and in a few years I will be dead again. I'm not conscious of that state of lifelessness which was before I came to life. And I'm not sure about the lifelessness that is yet to come. Life is only a station between these two states. It is a chance to experience and to do something, the only chance known with certainty. The major issue is to find what is worth living for, but an even greater issue is to find what is worth dying for. We all die anyway.

I wasn’t good enough to forgive offenses, but eventually I always forgot them.

I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings

I wish I could hold time in my hands. I wish I could talk to it. Oh, how I would ask it to give me just a few more increments of its elusive power. How can something we can’t touch or see have so much control over our lives. It was time that took you too soon, too young, before I got to say all of the things I wanted to, needed to. Things you will never know. And I carry them like a weight, these words, these sentences, right in the middle of my chest, because they have nowhere else to go. If only time had allowed me to understand the things I would want to say after you were gone. That’s the thing. They told me “don’t leave anything unsaid.” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say until it was too late, until you were gone. It was the time afterward that held all the wisdom.

I wish I could see butterflies burst from cocoons Without tempering my amazement Knowing all beauty eventually dies.

I wonder if there has been a book written on toes—the bottom parts of a body are just as important as the top parts. Each chapter would focus on one of the ten toes and each would inspire singular, existential commentary: the potential of our toes as leaders, the solidity of our little instruments, the dangers of relating size and value. It would be called The Toe Manifesto and people would be interested in reading it because, after all, it is the toe that goes forward first and foremost, and the toe that helps to tell us if our bodies are hot or cold—in other words, the toe experiences far more than we give it credit for.

Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.

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

Logica e de neclintit, dar aceasta nu-i rezista unui om care vrea sa traiasca.

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.

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.

Max: Why do I get the feeling you’ve played god and you don’t know what you’ve created. Dr Hurstville: Hasn’t god done the same with us?

Mainspring of Life (A Sonnet) I have no nationality except humanity, I have no tradition except compassion, I have no religion except liberty, I have no god except a family of 7 billion, I have no belief but only awareness, I have no creed but only acceptance, I have no messiah except the self, I have no scripture except my conscience, I have no gospel except godliness, I have no sermon except thought, I have no philosophy except oneness, I have nothing to give you except love a whole lot, I demand no obedience, nor do I desire worship and offering, For there is death in worship, and freedom is life's mainspring.

Meaning springs from belonging.

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meanwhile I was thinking that if half the cells in side of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate?

Molim lijepo, ali ti ni u najmanjoj mjeri ne misliš jednako kao ja. Ti se tužiš, jer se stvari ne rađaju oko tebe kao kita cvijeća, a da se ti i ne potrudiš da nešto učiniš. Ja nisam nikada tražila toliko: ja sam htjela djelovati.

Meslek ya da eğilim gereği insan üzerinde çok düşündüğümüz zaman primat maymunlara özlem duyduğumuz olur.

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

My consultants recommended several nihilists and existentialists but I rejected them all. A black turtleneck sweater does not a misanthrope make. Nihilists and existentialists tend to be bohemians, who invariably run in packs; despite their alienated stance, they have always struck me as a sociable lot who surround themselves with people because they are forever saying "Nothing matters," and they need someone to say it to.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.

My biggest trouble is that people look at me and think that no serious trouble has ever troubled my little head. They seldom realize the chaos that seethes behind my exterior. As for the who Am I, what am I angle...that will preoccupy me till the day I die.

Most people are just filler- like extras in the background of movies exist to make the scene appear fuller- they exist only to make earth appear fuller. But, really they are vapid, substanceless, in fact I avoid most people like the plague

My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible. It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth.