143 Existentialism Quotes

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.

Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?

To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.

I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world - we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

The living will envy the dead.

It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

The three eldest children of Necessity: God, the World and love.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm - this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Life may have no meaning -- or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

What must I do? I see nothing but obscurities on every side. Shall I believe I am nothing? Shall I believe I am God?

You are free and that is why you are lost.

Several times I asked myself, 'Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?' And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.

Life is a suicide mission.

Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that 'no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering.' That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet -- in the wrong universe.

My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that ? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.

The only sin is the sin of being born.

'Life has become the ideology of its own absence.'

'Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.'

I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: It should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can be fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false. But at least it represents a great adventure of the mind... No, everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. We know this. But we must first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account.

I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck. I grow delirious to contemplate the delicious horrors that are certain to happen to me. This is the keynote of my life, the untrammeled delight in every possibility of existence, potential or actual.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of 'work' because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.

Life without absorbing occupation is hell-joy consists in forgetting life.

In spite of increasing production and comfort, man loses more and more the sense of self, feels that his life is meaningless, even though such a feeling is largely unconscious. In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare-something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state-something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption. Man has always asked the question: what is it all about? Has life any meaning at all? He sees the enormous confusion of life, the brutalities, the revolt, the wars, the endless divisions of religion, ideology and nationality, and with a sense of deep abiding frustration he asks, what is one to do, what is this thing we call living, is there anything beyond it?

[The] chief [of the gods of Cimmeria] is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods? ... There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people. In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.

Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies. I keep sputtering out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

In this world with starry dome, Floored with gemlike plains and seas, Shall I never feel at home, Never wholly be at ease?

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. The horrible are the cancer patients and the terminal cases... the miserable is everyone else. So, be thankful that you're miserable.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life:

To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.

O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

The moment a man begins to question the meaning and value of life, he is sick.

That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.

...philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering Untergang for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.

The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss.

You got me blowin, blowin my mind, Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?

Someone has to be an audience for the play you people are always improvising. All of you trying for the center stage. All of you trying to get the audience to notice you, to declare you the star, so that when you die, the curtain will come down and the show will end. But it never does. No one was the star after all That's the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings Which should imply that it has no meaning I mean my own life. I mean what I do

This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.

Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.

Qu'est-ce donc que nous crie cette avidite et cette impuissance, sinon qu'il y a eu autrefois en l'homme un veritable bonheur dont il ne lui reste maintenant que la marque et la trace toute vide, qu'il essaye inutilement de remplir de tout ce qui l'environne, en cherchant dans les choses absentes le secours qu'il n'obtient pas des presentes, et que les unes et les autres sont incapables de lui donner, parce que ce gouffre infini ne peut etre rempli que par un objet infini et immuable, c'est-a-dire que par Dieu meme. (425)

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

If God exists, I'm so fucked.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. ... I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. ... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

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.

'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.

For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it's wrong or not, I'm beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, 'It's existential.' He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.

I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.

Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' - Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' - The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' - Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'

Mere by-blows are the world and we, And time within eternity A sheer anachronism.

If Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt. Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.

All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.

I can't help it. I was born a miscarriage. I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can't help it.... I'm tired.

'Most men', he quoted, 'are of naught more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into shit.' Ivan cocked an eyebrow at him. 'Who said that? Your grandfather?' 'Leonardo da Vinci', Miles returned primly. But was compelled to add, 'Grandfather quoted it to me, though.'

There's no meaning of life if I've lost you.

Is this earth? So beautiful and monstrous? Is this what we were?

For in order to avoid having to deal with relative values, he had long since come to deny all purpose to the phenomenon of existence - it was more expedient and comforting.

D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous?

The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

I think, ofttimes, that lives of men may be Likened to wandering winds that come and go Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.

Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein genug, um jede Studen zu weihen. Ich bin auf der Welt zu gering und doch nicht klein genug, um vor dir zu sein wie ein Ding, dunkel und klug. Ich will meinen Willen und will meinen Willen begleiten die Wege zur Tat; und will in stillen, irgendwie zorgernden Zeiten, wenn etwas naht, unter den Wissenden sein oder allein.

I cannot believe in a paradise Glorious, undefiled, For gates all scrolled and streets of gold Are tales for a dreaming child. I am too lost for shame That it moves me unto mirth, But I can vision a Hell of flame For I have lived on earth.

Paulus: Tillich As Spiritual Teacher (1973)

Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

It's to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.

How tell what remains ? But it's the end. Or have I been dreaming, am I dreaming ? No no, none of that, for dream is nothing, a joke, and significant what is worse.

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

Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it? Woman: Yes, it is. Allen: What does it say to you? Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos. Allen: What are you doing Saturday night? Woman: Committing suicide. Allen: What about Friday night?

Boris: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black emptiness. Sonja: What did you say? Boris: Oh, I was just planning my future.

'What is Bazarov?' Arkady smiled. 'Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?' 'Please do, nephew.' 'He is a nihilist!' 'What?' asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless. 'He is a nihilist,' repeated Arkady. 'A nihilist,' said Nikolai Petrovich. 'That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who... who recognizes nothing?' 'Say - who respects nothing,' interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it. 'Who regards everything from the critical point of view,' said Arkady. 'Isn't that exactly the same thing?' asked Pavel Petrovich. 'No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.' 'Well, and is that good?' asked Pavel Petrovich. 'That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.' 'Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez change tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your... what was the name?' 'Nihilists,' said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly. 'Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa.'

Oh my Lord, tell me what I'm livin for/Everybody's droppin got me knockin on heaven's door