Quotes About Existentialism

That's the question, isn't it?" you said one night. "Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?

A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe. 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.

Oh, we are in an angsty mood tonight!" "True, true. And what good does it do? Maybe 'we' think too much, in between bouts of not thinking enough." "I think you've just written out the recipe for being human.

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

Death doesn't really worry me that much, I'm not frightened about it... I just don't want to be there when it happens.

I always live in the present. I don't know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing.

There's no present, there's no future, I don't even know about the past.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.

Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are.

Maybe I'm afraid that if I could do otherwise I would gradually cease to be a human being, and would soon be creeping about, dirty and stinking, emitting incomprehensible noises. Not that I'm afraid of becoming an animal. That wouldn't be too bad, but a human being can never become just an animal; he plunges beyond, into the abyss.

You are consciousness dressed in form, my love. Consciousness is divine. Matter is divine. Creation is divine. Everything is divine. Are you somehow the only exception?

The human person, the human being, is not just an object among objects, not just a thing in the world. The human being is a being-in-the-world, a being-with-others, a being-for-others.

True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.

The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

When one existentially awakens from within, the relation of birth-and-death is not seen as a sequential change from the former to the latter. Rather, living as it is, is no more than dying, and at the same time there is no living separate from dying. This means that life itself is death and death itself is life. That is, we do not shift sequentially from birth to death, but undergo living-dying in each and every moment.

I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. —Albert Camus, A Happy Death

Anxiety,' Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 'is the dizziness of freedom.

But she'd been feeling lonely. And though she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.