Quotes About Philosophy

I am condemned to be free.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Nothingness lies coiled at the heart of being like a worm

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. 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. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

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.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

On this view, God is the cause of physical evil. The question arose, then, whether He is also the cause of sin and of moral evil; and, if so, how He could have invented the very thing that corrupts His creation. The attempt to vindicate God's will was called theodicy in Greek, and it is this term that is traditionally used to refer to all human attempts to justify the existence of evil in a world that has been perfectly made. Theodicies

Much blood has been spilled over words, and a great deal of it over the word 'God.' (125)

Pain is sometimes the cost of a meaningful existence. I can handle that.

Maybe the meaning of your life is what your life means to you now. It's hard to understand that time doesn't exist because we have such a clear experience of past, present and future, but we don't really experience past and future, only present. Past and future are just ideas in the present. This means that there is only now, but what is now? We can't say what now is because there is no not-now. It's always now. There is only now.

Let us forget the lapse of time; let us forget the conflict of opinions. Let us make our appeal to the infinite, and take up our positions there. Chuang Tzu

A common example of Spiritual Dissonance would be; If God loves us, why does He allow so much suffering? The certainty of God's love is the internal belief. The obviousness of human suffering is the external reality. Is God unable to end suffering? No, we must answer, because He can do whatever He wants. Therefore, He must allow or even cause suffering. But how can that be if He loves us? Something somewhere has to give or, preferably, we avoid asking the question in the first place.

What do we know for sure? That's the real question. That's what the cogito is. That's what solipsism is. This isn't theory. This isn't belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It's all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It's truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.