Quotes About Existentialism

For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

Spirit and soul is horseshit of the worst sort. Obviously there are no fairies, no Santa Clauses, no spirits. What there is, is human goals and purposes as noted by sane existentialists. But a lot of transcendentalists are utter screwballs.

Querer ganar en el juego sin ninguna carta en la mano, ni buena ni mala. Sin ánimos, tampoco, de ser espectadora. Sin ánimos, ni siquiera eso, de confesarme que me hastían el juego, las cartas, los jugadores y los espectadores.

Quien no vive trágicamente se vuelve idiota. Vivir trágicamente es tomar el camino de la locura y del suicidio a corto plazo. Esto que digo implica tanto idiotez cuanto locura. No

Your name is the disease of things at midnight.

God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave.

Life in general has no meaning. Whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual.

When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.

'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.

As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

I can't kill myself, I thought. I'm too insignificant. I'm nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the first-floor window of a skyscraper, a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea along with millions of tons of raw sewage, a squirrel eating a nut as a car bore down on him.

Aren't I happy?' Ursula puzzled. What do you think? Ursula didn't know. She wasn't sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.