Quotes About Philosophy

One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is--other people!

Thus pleasure itself, also becoming a right, lost its aggressive futility.

The flesh is the pure contingency of presence.

Obviously, nothing new has happened in a manner of speaking. This morning, at a quarter past eight, as I was leaving the Hôtel Printania to go to the library, I tried to pick up a piece of paper lying on the ground and didn't succeed. That's all, and it isn't even an event. Yes, but, to tell the whole truth, it made a profound impression on me: it occurred to me that I was no longer free.

First, it has been charged with inviting people to remain in a kind of desperate quietism because, since no solutions are possible, we should have to consider action in this world as quite impossible. We should then end up in a philosophy of contemplation; and since contemplation is a luxury, we come in the end to a bourgeois philosophy. The communists in particular have made these charges.

I exist because I think … and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment–it's frightful–if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing.

L'existence précède l'essence

La plupart du temps, faute de s'attacher à des mots, mes pensées restent des brouillards. Elles dessinent des formes vagues et plaisantes, s'engloutissent : aussitôt, je les oublie.

Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing—not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence—which is limited only by existence.

Var olmak susamadan içmek gibi bir ÅŸeydir.

From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure.

What is meant by the term existentialism? Most people who use the word would be rather embarrassed if they had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A gossip columnist in Clartés signs himself The Existentialist, so that by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. (. . .) If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time.

Hands don't catch thoughts

Gesti, gesti, piccole distruzioni, che cosa significano, io ho creduto che questa fosse la libertà.

Impossibile, si è creature nate sotto il cielo, ecco il male.

Roquentin wonders if he could do the same as the man who wrote the tune. Not in music, but in the realm of art. Not a history book, because that is about what has existed, and existence is pointless, is not necessary.

The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, "with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion," was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death.

Before beginning this treatise, he wanted the advice of The Baboon, his philosophy prof. "Excuse me, sir," he said at the end of a class, "could anyone claim that we don't exist?" The Baboon said no. "Goghito," he said, "ergo zum. You exist because you doubt your existence.

Man is condemned to be free.

Oysa sevmiÅŸti o, yaÅŸamak istemiÅŸti ve kendini ölürken görmüÅŸtü; bunlar bir insan?n insan olmas?na yeter.

Zaten sözcüklerden gayr? ne var ki...

I am on the same plane specific object and free subject but never the two at the same time and always the one haunted by the Other.