Quotes About Existentialism

Desde James Joyce, sabemos que a maior aventura de nossa vida é a ausência de aventuras.

The more man realises his humanity, the lonelier he feels.

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

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is The Brothers Karamazov.

The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.

Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist.

I didn't know if I should put my faith in God or Satan. Was there really a difference at the end of the day, when we were all going to be dead souls anyway?

Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life?

He was a man who had already died once. There was no reason why he should feel any sense of responsibility or attachment to the world. To him, it was nothing more than a sheet of newspaper covered in the scribblings of cockroaches.

Hanio believed that his ideas were all rooted in meaninglessness and they blossomd into life at the very moment when meaning was created. For that reason, he never once initiated any action on the grounds that it was meaningful. People who ascribe meaning to their actions ended up staring meaninglessness in the face, in a state of frustration and hopelessness.

Somehow the habit of eating had never appeared so ridiculous to me, and I rubbed my eyes. Presently I realized that my point of view came from having completely lost the desire to live.

Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty? At least there was no doubt that I was alone in regarding the duty as a heavy burden.

Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won't have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Eventually, if we want to come clean about past mistakes, our narrating self must invent some twist in the plot that will infuse these mistakes with meaning.

The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of all.

I was introduced to the void by the rebuffed nothingness. ReddedilmiÅŸ hiçlik taraf?ndan boÅŸlukla tan??t?r?ld?m.

Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.

Od dawna ju? nie mam tych z?udzie?, ?e jestem sob?! Piotr wykona? gest pob?a?liwy, ale Jakub nie da? sobie przerwa?. - Przeciwnie,jestem workiem, wypchanym ?ywymi i umar?ymi. Jestem zbiegowiskiem ludzi obcych i ich spraw. - I gdybym nawet by? sob? - zgubiony w tej gromadzie, w tej st?oczonej masie - tobym doprawdy nie wiedzia?, który to jestem ja. Czy my?l? i czuj? sob?, czy tymi tam wszystkimi w sobie.

Although personal calling I sense—who am I? even if I am, I don't know.

The only satisfactory thing about death is that our knowledge about it is unsatisfactory.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.