Quotes About Existence

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.

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.

Where shall I keep mine? You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free.

I had been born in order to fill the great need I had of myself.

People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity… Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.

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.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

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.

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

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.

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.

Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie.

They are young and well built, they have another thirty years ahead of them. So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

Nothingness carries being in its heart.

Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.

Perhaps it's inevitable; perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all, or impersonating what one is. That would be terrible,' he said to himself: 'it would mean that we were duped by nature.