Existentialism Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Existentialism

Existentialism Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Existentialism quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time. — Steven L. Peck

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. — Simone De Beauvoir

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. — Simone De Beauvoir

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time - I doubt whether I am a human being. — Franz Kafka

Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life. — Muriel Spark

If you want good luck; you must go out there and search for that luck!! Because luck is waiting for you to look for it. — Temitope Owosela

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship. — Rollo May

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire - and it would come to absolutely the same thing. — Albert Camus

Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it. — Jules Renard

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small. — Paul Bowles

Scheming is mediocre. — Vipin Behari Goyal

Say not: I live today, I shall die tomorrow. Divide not reality between life and death. Say: now I live and die. — Marcel Schwob

...not positive about the definition of existentialism but it seems like the opposite of nihilism in which case I suppose I may be. — Autumn

By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me. — Jean Genet

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

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality. — Rabih Alameddine

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

Time is only linear for engineers and referees. — Craig Ferguson

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living. — Arundhati Roy

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you. — Delmore Schwartz

It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for. — Jane Hamilton

I rebel; therefore I exist. — Albert Camus

Why are we here? We're here to go! — William S. Burroughs

Deep down, it's all baseball, no matter what kind of geometrical shape you play it with. — Vernon D. Burns

The sky both exists and doesn't exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn't. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in. — Haruki Murakami

After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him. — David Mitchell

Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target. — John Edgar Wideman

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. — Ernest Becker

I want my name to mean me. — Mark Haddon

Little Newt snorted. "Religion!"
"Beg your pardon?" Castle said.
"See the cat?" asked Newt. "See the cradle? — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us? — Cornelia Funke

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat. — Jose Saramago

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him. — Soren Kierkegaard

This is the world, he thought. And I am in it. — Nick Harkaway

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away. — Saul Bellow

The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself. — Albert Camus

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. — Albert Camus

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite. — George Ainslie

Uncertainty is the normal state. — Tom Stoppard

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected — James Wright

In the real journey of life, it is not what you do; it is what you don't do that matters the most. — Harshit Walia

After awhile you could get used to anything. — Albert Camus

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone. — Andrew Sean Greer

I can't go on, I'll go on. — Samuel Beckett

We need to start a new philisophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. — Jandy Nelson

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood. — Matthew Woodring Stover

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it. — Hunter S. Thompson

You are nothing but what you think. That is existentialism. — Debasish Mridha

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him. — Rollo May

CLOV:
Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM:
Mine was always that. — Samuel Beckett

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it. — Simone De Beauvoir

Without awareness, we are not truly alive. — James F.T. Bugental

New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts. — David Lynch

I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late. — Jean-Paul Sartre

If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living? — Christopher Bram

It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies. — David Eagleman

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame. — William Faulkner

We shall have thousands of Shatovs to deal with — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things. — Stephen Chbosky

My mother once said if you can't handle the fact that your world-view might be entirely inaccurate, you are not worthy of believing in it. — Sean J Halford

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it. — Anton Chekhov

Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy. — Jason Daniel Chaplin

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning. — Albert Camus

Everything is true, and nothing is true! — Albert Camus

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. — Simone De Beauvoir

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100. — Woody Allen

bullshit french post-war rationalizing — Woody Allen

You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.

This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness. — Kristen Henderson

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My favorite word is existentialism. I can't say it and I'm not quite sure what it means. — Geri Halliwell

Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger. — Leo Strauss

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought. — David Eagleman

This existenitalist stuff sure is crap — Daniel Younger

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. — Ernest Becker

In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes. — Nick Payne

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

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. — Miguel De Unamuno

It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. — Viktor E. Frankl

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it. — Tom Stoppard

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning. — Susan Moody

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals. — Ernest Becker

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening — Zhuangzi

Just because someone is a loner, it doesn't mean they're alone. And just because someone is alone, it doesn't mean they're lonely. — Jason Daniel Chaplin

Life has no meaning a priori ... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. — Jean-Paul Sartre

In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being. — Boris Pasternak

Some men become what they were born for. — Sheenagh Pugh

We co-existed in peaceful detachment — Tsitsi Dangarembga

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it. — Frank Herbert

Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern. — Paul Tillich

Sartre turns love into a 'battle between two hypnotists in a closed room'. — Iris Murdoch

Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is. — Johnny Rich

I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.' — Craig Ferguson

I decided to give up meaningless sex, but then I remembered that everything is meaningless. — Oli Anderson

Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations. — Jean-Paul Sartre