Quotes About Existence

Aujourd'hui, je n'ai pas vécu

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom

Life can't be bought piecemeal; it has to be purchased in bulk- all or nothing. Only there isn't time enough for everything, that's the tragedy of it.

If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.

Mais de toute façon, engendrer, allaiter ne sont pas des activités, ce sont des fonctions naturelles; aucun projet n'y est engagé; c'est pourquoi la femme n'y trouve pas le motif d'une affirmation hautaine de son existence; elle subit passivement son destin biologique.

I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings

But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.

I asked Isabelle whether she was happy. "I never ask myself, so I suppose the answer is yes." At all events she likes the moment of waking up. That seems to me a pretty good definition of happiness! It is the same with me: every morning, when I open my eyes, I smile.

Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.

depopulates it. Nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices. And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled.

In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.

I cannot withdraw into myself. I exist, outside myself and everywhere in the world. There is not an inch of my path which does not encroach on the path of another: there is no way of being that can prevent me from overflowing myself at every moment. This life that I weave with my own substance, it offers other men a thousand unknown faces, it crosses impetuously their fate.

Ik koos het bestaan niet, maar ik besta. Een ongerijmdheid die verantwoordelijk voor zichzelf is, dat ben ik.

One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity.

The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases.

Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and not suppress itself. To attain this truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.

The nihilist is right in thinking that the world _possesses_ no justification and that he himself _is_ nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly.

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.

We only exist if we act.

I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life

Ich muß fühlen, daß ich lebe. Und wenn ich darüber sterbe.

Humans are the beings whose essence is in not having an essence

Un existant n'est rien d'autre que ce qu'il fait; le possible ne déborde pas le réel, l'essence ne précède pas l'existence; dans sa pure subjectivité, l'être humain n'est rien. On le mesure à ses actes.