Selected existential quotes

1. Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, - Outward bound.

2. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

3. I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

4. Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

5. The entire universe will eventually disintegrate but by then I hope to be in a safer place.

6. Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

7. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

8. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

9. For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

10. Less base the fear of death than fear of life.

11. When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

12. Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

13. When I compare myself, my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.

14. All of life is a foreign country.

15. Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

16. Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

17. The keenest pangs the wretched find Are rapture to the dreary void, The leafless desert of the mind, The waste of feelings unemployed.

18. When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense.

19. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

20. Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

21. Being dead is one way to experience nothing - another is to attend some classes at my school.

22. 'If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?'

23. I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the clubfooted ghoul come near me.

24. 'I just believe that life is more than rehearsing how to die.'

25. 'If heaven is the reason and dieing is the door, than why aren't we all leaving what's the drama for?'

26. 'But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.'

27. 'In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.'

28. 'Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.'

29. My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination, Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

30. Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

31. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them.

32. For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. (72)

33. It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. (348)

34. Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

35. I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, you want to kill me? Ha! I'm already dead, have been all my life. I've spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built.

36. My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either. It happens to be my view, but it doesn't challenge any of the findings of Darwin or Huxley or Einstein or Hawking.

37. Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

38. Later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

39. Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

40. I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart. I want my free will and want it accompanying the path which leads to action; and want during times that beg questions, where something is up, to be among those in the know, or else be alone.

41. I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

42. If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.

43. Life is neither a feast nor a spectacle, but a predicament.

44. Qui sait si cette autre moitie de la vie ou nous pensons veiller n'est pas un autre sommeil un peu different du premier.

45. Helas! tout est abime, - action, desir, reve, Parole!

46. L'ame est une chose si impalpable, si souvent inutile et quelquefois si genante, que je n'eprouvai, quant a cette perte, qu'un peu moins d'emotion que si j'avais egare, dans une promenade, ma carte de visite.

47. The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later. As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.

48. If God exists, I'm so fucked.

49. Now that I understand myself and others, I'm supposed to die? What a crap game! I'd like to live to be 200 or 300 years old.

50. A sense of utter loneliness-loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness-enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. He shuddered at the thought that death might overlook him, and deny him its refuge.

51. 'Heartbreak, jealousy, loneliness-, Elvis Presley gave luxuriant voice to these less than cheerful emotions, but did you ever think of him as a balladeer of the unbearable bleakness of being, of the horror of existing without purpose in a godless universe? In the improbably vivacious London-born production of 'Woyzeck', vintage Elvis recordings provide much of the background music for Daniel Kramer's adaptation of Georg Buchner's great, prophetic drama of existential emptiness from the 1830's. Dolly Parton and, more predictably, Beethoven, make aural guest appearances but it's the voice of the Pelvis that sets the rhythm of life. And if the 'wedding' of Presley and Buchner is more shotgun marriage than natural love match, at least you leave the theater feeling less suicidal than you normally do, after two hours with one of the grimmest heroes in Western literature.

52. If you have a faith, if you've some deep conviction, whether you're a Nazi or a Communist or what the hell else you are - then you can sacrifice yourself and others to your faith. But from the moment you've no faith - from that moment you live in a deep inner confusion - from then on you're exposed to what Strindberg calls 'the powers'.

53. I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.

54. Hark! to the hurried question of despair: 'Where is my child?'-an echo answers, 'Where?'

55. Which makes life itself a lie, Flattering dust with eternity.

56. You ask a faith, - they are content with faith; You ask to have, - but they reply 'IT hath.' There is no end, there need be no path.

57. I used to be able to look at myself and grin without giving a damn about how ugly it made me look. Now I was looking at myself the same way those people did back there. I was looking at a big guy with an ugly reputation, a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society. That's what the judge had said. I was sweating and cold at the same time. Maybe it did happen to me over there. Maybe I did have a taste for death. Maybe I liked it too much to taste anything else. Maybe I was twisted and rotted inside. Maybe I would be washed down the sewer with the rest of all the rottenness sometime. What was stopping it from happening now? Why was I me with some kind of lucky charm around my neck that kept me going when I was better off dead?

58. Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on all visible things and ascending. Behind his heavy and blood-splattered feet I hear all living things being trampled on and crushed. His face is without laughter, dark and silent, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond hope.

59. Nature too remains, so far as we have yet come, ever a frightful Machine of Death: everywhere monstrous revolution, inexplicable vortices of movement; a kingdom of Devouring, of the maddest tyranny; a baleful Immense: the few light-points disclose but a so much the more appalling Night, and terrors of all sorts must palsy every observer.

60. Why has my life turned out to be so worthless?

61. Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort.

62. Du im Voraus verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene, nicht wei? ich, welche Tone dir lieb sind. Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt, zu erkennen.

63. 'In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence.'

64. 'Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element.'

65. A star looks down at me, And says: 'Here I and you Stand each in our degree: What do you mean to do,- Mean to do?'

66. I see no changes. Wake up in the morning and I ask myself/'Is life worth living? Should I blast myself?'

67. After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it. ~ Ch. 4

68. If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? pg. 297

69. I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

70. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

71. There is hope, but not for us.

72. One of the English science-fiction writers once said, 'Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.' ... I must say I agree with him.

73. The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull and insensitive he is. The animal's life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human's, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

74. I was gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death ... This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.

75. Life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.

76. The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general and when only its most significant features are emphasised, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail, it has the characteristics of a comedy.

77. Ultimately, death must triumph, for by birth it has already become our lot and it plays with its prey only for a while before swallowing it up. However, we continue our life with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible - just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.

78. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is 4 600 000 000 years old. It could end in an afternoon.

79. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected - like it or not - 'life is but a dream.'

80. I have always - at least, ever since I can remember - had a kind of longing for death.'

81. I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.

82. There's nothing at the center of what we do.

83. What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

84. Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.

85. My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

86. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

87. The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

88. Life is a horizontal fall.

89. One lives but once in the world.

90. And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?

91. Archie Rice: I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they.

92. And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

93. The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.

94. It may be we shall know in the hereafter Why we, begetting hopes, give birth to fears, And why the world's too beautiful for laughter, Too gross for tears.

95. And nothing to look backward to with pride, And nothing to look forward to with hope.

96. I am assured at any rate Man's practically inexterminate. Someday I must go into that. There's always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at.

97. Why is the illusion of life so 'fake'?

98. One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, 'I will always be here.'

99. Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel? ...Sometimes he makes us live.

100. I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids...Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.