Selected existentialism quotes

1. 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.

2. There is not love of life without despair about life.

3. At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

4. 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.

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

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

7. Life is everything and nothing all at once.

8. 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.

9. 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?

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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. My witness is the empty sky.

17. If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

18. The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

19. Are we alone in an uncaring universe, or is God some kind of wiseguy?

20. Humor is just another defense against the universe.

21. The living will envy the dead.

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

23. 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?

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

25. 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.

26. 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?

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

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

29. 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.

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

31. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

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

33. You are free and that is why you are lost.

34. 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.

35. Life is a suicide mission.

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. The only sin is the sin of being born.

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

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

41. Ihre (Predigern des Todes) Weisheit lautet: 'ein Thor, der leben bleibt, aber so sehr sind wir Thoren! Und das eben ist das Thorichtste am Leben!' -

42. From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others. But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a 'useless passion,' that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they have first defined.

43. I have an essay with the title 'Eyes in their Last Extremity'. The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued: 'I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.' Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five. In my essay, 'Eyes in their Last Extremity', I had to say: 'How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint.' I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.

44. The Meaning of Anxiety (1950)

45. Existential Psychoanalysis (1962)

46. Existential Psychology (1969)