Quotes About Existence

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing

In the second place, this is the only theory that endows man with any dignity, and the only one that does not turn him into an object.

it is not only oneself that one discovers in the cogito, but also the existence of others.

Roquentin is visited by a deeper, more philosophical ailment: he falls into bouts of what he calls his "Nausea." These are episodes in which, afflicted by his sense that there is "absolutely no more reason for living

Nothing has changed and yet everything exists in a different way. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure is happening to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here: it is I who am piercing the darkness, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

At one point, Roquentin realizes that the seat he is on is a seat only by name: "it could just as well be a dead donkey. . . . Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things.

Mein augenblickliches Leben ist nicht besonders glanzvoll, [...]

Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.

Suffering just means you're having a bad dream. Happiness means you're having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.

Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.

The bottom line remains the same: you're either awake or you're not.One day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles.

Enlightenment isn't when you go there; it's when there comes here.

All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.

The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it's just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn't in the character, it's in the underlying truth.

Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can't stop seeing it that way. It's everywhere, everyone. It doesn't make any sense. That's not life. It can't be. I don't know what it is, but it's not life.

The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti

Escape is no longer called for or even especially healthy. Escape from life is death.

an undecidable presence-absence at the origin of meaning.

This strikes at the very roots of Western metaphysics, because it's the claim to full presence which underpins metaphysical concepts and procedures.

If the universe came into and out of existence and there were no brains to know it, did the universe really exist? Who would know?

Truly random thoughts don't exist.

It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all.

Who was I if I was no longer me?

A bag of meat that breathes, and when that stops, nothing but rotting garbage.