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Quotes About Existentialism

My job is to make meaning. To make meaning in a meaningless world.
~ Grayson Perry
I was so stupid when I was young. I thought that everyone should share my feelings and my sadness about the state of the world, the stuff you have when you are 16 and are asking if God exists.
~ Bruno Ganz
I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.
~ Duncan Jones
fact, almost everything that was philosophically articulated in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, from the Young Hegelians to French Existentialism, from the early Socialists to Critical Theory, grew in the conservatories of a second romantic loser atmosphere.
~ Peter Sloterdijk
Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I
~ Peter Watts
T]here is now a void at the heart of everything. But then there is so much more of everything now!
~ Phil Smith
Man detaches himself from his surroundings; he feels alone; abandoned, ignorant of everything except that he knows nothing... His first feeling thus was existential anxiety, which may even have taken him to the limits of despair.
~ Pierre Bergounioux
Selon la méthode humaine bien connue : je me guérissais de la terre en me fabriquant un ciel ; je l'appelais néant.
~ Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
~ Emil Cioran
brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs
~ Jon Krakauer
Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this okay?
~ Jonathan Franzen
Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn't exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Is God sad? He would have to exist to be sad, wouldn't He? I know, she said, giving his shoulder a little slap. That's why I was asking, so I might finally know if you believed! Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal to be sad about. And if He doesn't exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Y no comprendo cómo el tiempo pasa Yo, que soy tiempo y sangre y agonía.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments. A New Refutation of Time
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Who knows what kind of loneliness is more agonizing: the one which befalls man when he casts his glance at the mute cosmos, at its dark spaces and monotonous drama, or the one that besets man exchanging glances with his fellow man in silence?
~ Joseph B. Soloveitchik
I am always frightened of something which exists in the majority of people, but which I cannot explain. The young generation of the period of transition were like me. In our mind we despised our slavery, but we ourselves became cowardly slaves. Our hatred was deep and passionate, but barren, like the mad love of a eunuch.
~ A. I. Kuprin
the "human need for transcendence should be met with minimal embarrassments to reason,
~ Adam Begley
Hell is other people.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
you always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line.
~ Poppy Z. Brite