Quotes About Existence

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

In the distance. Above my head; above my head; and this instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence.

Don't you ever get taken that way? When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.

This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything that he does.

Can you justify your existence then?

It was true, I had always realized it—I hadn't any "right" to exist at all. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. I could feel nothing to myself but an inconsequential buzzing. I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.

I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.

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.

Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such

Man is free rather than man is freedom.

I'm going to leave, I'm going to take my train. But behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.

I feel there are no more perfect moments. I feel it in my legs when I walk. I feel it all the time, even when I sleep. I can't forget it. I am dazzled, uncomfortable, I can't get used to it.

Je n'ai pas rêvé cet héroïsme. Je l'ai choisi. On est ce qu'on veut.

Din clipa în care libertatea a f?cut explozie în sufletul unui om, zeii nu mai pot face nimic împotriva lui. Asta-i o treab? omeneasc?, ÅŸi numai ceilalÅ£i oameni - numai ei - au c?derea s?-l lase în libertate sau s?-l strîngâ de gît.

For the moment they wanted to live with the least expenditure, economize words, gestures, thoughts, float: they had only one day in which to smooth out their wrinkles, their crow's feet, the bitter lines made by a hard week's work. One day only.

If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.

The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.

I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.

Un hombre que está solo es hermoso. - Tan hermoso que enseguida da ganas de hacerle compañía. Y desde entonces deja de estar solo: así es el mundo.

To exist is to create your own life.

nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.

You have to talk to make sure you're alive.

In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.