Best 642 quotes in «existentialism quotes» category

Vidim pod svojim nogama siva iskrenja Bouvilla. Reklo bi se, da tu pod suncem leže brdašca ljuskavih školjki, ivera kostiju, piljaka. Izgubljene među tim podrtinama, sićušne krhotine stakla ili tinjca ispuštaju na trenutke lagane sjevove. Žljebovi, rovovi, sitne brazde, koje teku između ljuštura. Za jedan sat će biti ulice; ja ću hodati po tim ulicama, među zidovima. Za sat ću biti jedan od onih malih crnih čovječuljaka, koje razabirem u ulici Boulibet. Kako se osjećam daleko od njih s visa onog brežuljka. Čini mi se, da ja pripadam nekoj drugoj vrsti. Oni izlazeiz ureda nakon svojega radnog dana; oni s izrazom zadovoljstva gledaju kuće i male trgove, oni misle, da je to njihov grad, ''lijepi purgerski grad''. Ne boje se, osjećaju se kod kuće. Oni su uvijek vidjeli samo pripitomljenu vodu, koja istječe iz pipaca, samo sjvetlost, koja izvire iz žarulje kada se pritisne na prekidač, samo križanačka, kopilanska stabla, koja podupiru vilama. Oni sto puta na dan dobivaju dokaz, da sve izvodi stroj, da se svijet pokorava čvrstim i nepromijenjivim zakonima. Tijela puštena u praznini sva padaju jednakom brzinom, gradski perivoj se zatvara svakoga dana u isti sat (16 zimi, 18 ljeti), olovo se otapa na 335*, posljednji tramvaj polazi od gradske općine u 23h 5. Oni su mirni, malo mrzovoljni, oni misle na Sutra, to jest jednostavno na novo danas: gradovi raspolažu samo jednim danom koji se potpuno isti vraća svakoga jutra. Samo ga malo nakite svake nedjelje. Budale. Odvratno mi je misliti, da ću opet vidjeti njihova debela i spokojna lica. Oni donose zakone, pišu pučke romane, žene se, prave groznu glupost, da rađaju djecu. Međutim velika neodređena priroda ušuljala se u njihov grad, ona se uvukla svuda, u njihovu kuću, u njihove urede, u njih same. Ona se ne miče, ona se drži spokojno u njima, a oni, oni su potpuno utonuli u nju, oni je udišu, a ne vide je, oni misle, da je ona vani, na 20 velikih milja od grada. Ja vidim tu prirodu, ja je vidim. Znam da ona ne trpi zakona: ono, što oni smatraju njenom postojanošću... Ona ima samo navika, a sutradan ih može promijeniti.

Vinculum alius ergo sum - Another bond, therfore I am.

Vinculum alius ergo sum - Another bond, therefore I am.

Waking to the reality of injustice is like the cracking of an eggshell. Your whole world had caged you and you didn’t know it. Once the cage cracks open, you can never get back inside. You are out in the cold and the weather. You can encounter a hundred new dangers. But also, you are free. You can stretch. You can run. You can bite. You can see impossible skies that didn’t exist while you were in the egg.

We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.

We are the Gods, who create Gods, and then we turn into worshipers seeking comfort and solace from those Gods that we create. And we do all this, in order to have as much soothing existence as possible.

We are; therefore I believe.

We are whom who admire

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.

We can't even resist making antimatter, so what makes you think we are going to leave cloning technology untapped? (Douglas Parsley)

We co-existed in peaceful detachment

We create our own chains with which we bind ourselves and then we keep yelling as raving lunatics, why are we not free?

We do not need to look beyond this life to judge the significance of most human relationships.

We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…

We have an infinite supply of information and yet we cannot read.

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual.

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.

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

Well, that's not true. I need to work for a living.” “No, that's not true. You think you need to work like this because that's what you've been told. That is merely an idea put into your head. In actuality, you can walk away any time you want.

We have started the journey- no turning back now. Three steps lie between us and the goal: (1) Know who you are. (2) Know what you need. (3) Get it. These steps need to be taken in sequence. I cannot know what I need before I know who I am. I cannot go after what I need before I know what I need.

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

What are all the thoughts rattling in your mind when you're not listening to the answers to questions you ask?" -Jo, Boom

Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity.

What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once.

What is becomes what was. It is this fact that, given enough time, makes man insignificant. [1.6 Death makes everything insignificant.]

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Whereas a table is a table is a table, humans have no preexisting essence and so define themselves,

What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?

[W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply 'do what you like, I'm just here for you', but it...is, or can be, very manipulative. It is a way of getting the other person to exercise all his or her efforts towards pleasing you, and in that way controlling what they're thinking, and in particular what they're thinking of you.

What's the point of wandering? to find a better place? a home? But the loneliness will always capture me in its claws of no tomorrow

What you think I think of you is what you think of yourself

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera.

When a man gets drunk he gets sentimental. That's what I wanted to avoid.

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge. Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left.

When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of them and turn it to one's own purpose and pierce through the murk, it became blunt and useless as a piece of cardboard.

When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsible for what we are, what we do, I say yes!" The affirmative echoed around the woods. The dog pricked up his ears. This man has no one to talk to, thought Inni. "But when he then asks me to be responsible for the world as well, for others, I say no! No. Why should I be? 'When man chooses himself, he chooses all men.' Why? I have not asked for anything. I have nothing to do with the vermin I see around me. I live out my time because I have to, that is all.

When reason has followed its road to the end, the point of crisis is reached and man is brought to the great question mark over his own existence.

Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.

When T. finished she sat beside the toilet, her hand dipped in it, and lay there for the next few moments frozen in time, enjoying the rush of the excrement, but at the same time, paralyzed by the fear of what was to come. She felt like a person who has just lost their job, one they had worked so long for, and now, faced with the crushing reality of debt coming on them from all sides, feels overburdened and forlorn with no hope at all to rescue them from their insecure present. T. began to return home, as she walked through the University she realized it was deserted, everyone had fled. The stray cats were still there though, and they watched her as she walked by. When she returned home, she found the house empty. Kevin and her husband were both gone, and the only sign of her husband was a note left on the refrigerator, written angrily, and it said, “What the hell is wrong with you?” The Doctor had picked up their son Kevin from school and took him for a drive out into the country. Kevin was a sweet boy, innocent, whose light hair flowed down his forehead, touching in strands his eyebrows. His mother loved him very much. In fact, while Kevin sometimes wondered why his Father never seemed to notice him except for when he had to, he was always consoled by the pleasant sound of his mother’s voice as it put him to sleep in the evenings, and woke him from dangerous infantile dreams in the mornings. Kevin, for the first time in his life, felt that not only his Mother, but also his Father, loved him. “I love you dad.” He said to him in the car as they drove down the highway. His Father only smiled, artificially, as he said that, not glancing away from the road. Kevin did not know the difference between smiles, and how some can show sincerity, and others, dissimulation. Kevin did not know that his Father did not love him. He turned his gaze away from his Father to the window, watching the verdant fields roll past, smiling as he thought of how great his Father was.

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.

Who am I? The great inquiry indeed.

Will is nobler than truth

Why doesn't the pope convert to Calvinism? Why doesn't the Dalai Lama, convert to Christianity, why doesn't Billy Graham convert to Islam, Why doesn't the Ayatollahs convert to Buddhism, Why isn't Buddhism swept away? Religious leaders know that all religions are equal; they know that no one of them has the monopoly to the knowledge of God. They know that each religion is trying to find the hidden God and that no one religion can claim to have found him beyond doubt. That's why they remain where they are and respect each other.

Why must we overlook what we are most likely able to do?

Why should injustice, the darkness of justice, exist and not be an imperfect entry in a book unread for centuries? Until it is so forgotten, that no one remembers it was ever there.

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.

Wouldn’t the joys of life lose all colour, if life was eternal?

Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.

Without your stories, without your heroes and their awesome powers, how could you explain this, this here, this incomprehensible real that ever refuses to embrace any rule, any cliché besides the intransigent, pathetic truth that we all end, that no one comes back.