Quotes About Philosophy

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency...

The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.

I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

J'existe, c'est tout.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

I don't even bother looking for words. It flows in me, more or less quickly. I fix nothing, I let it go. Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost immediately.

J'ai commencé ma vie comme je la finirai sans doute : au milieu des livres.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes' argument "I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.

On meurt toujours trop tôt ? ou trop tard. Et cependant la vie est là, terminée: le trait est tiré, il faut faire la somme. Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie.

know very well that I don't want to do anything: to do something is to create existence—and there's quite enough existence as it is.

I am a mere breath of air; a formless thought that thinks of you.

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

If I didn't try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....

Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence.

Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?

I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.

We have so much difficulty imagining nothingness.