Quotes About Existentialism

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.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Look at Sam Beckett. Most depressed man who ever lived, but he sure was funny.

At some point, I kind of went through this weird existential crisis in high school where I was just really depressed.

Would I consider myself alt-right, if you want to ask that question? No, I don't. Not even a little bit. I think I am a pretty devout Christian, and I treat my walk with Christ very seriously - very seriously - in a way that I'm constantly looking at the things I do and how that affects me existentially.

I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'

I came here to get there. Do I have any fucking clue what there is? Hell the fuck no. I'm just trying to live in a world of the dead.

Now I have something to tell you, her brother said. Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play.

And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

D]iese skeptische Gegenwart glaubt weder an Gott noch an die Humanität, weder an Kronen noch Sittlichkeit - oder sie glaubt an alles zusammen, was auf das gleiche hinauskommt.

Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

Who would endure life if it were not for the hope of death?

Uncle Jim, if I wasn't ME who'd I be?' and, 'Uncle Jim, what would happen if God died?

Is That All There Is?

I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad.

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

There are people, moreover, for whom even the absence of God is absent, who are shaken not by the privation of providence but by the privation of the privation, who live in a completely ungoverned and unconsoling world. To use the terms of another religious existentialist of Judaism against him: there is a man who is lonelier than the lonely man of faith, and he is the lonely man of no faith.

You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--

Comparisons have been made with Stirner, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus, to name only a few.3 He won tributes from Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, who acknowledged his formative influence on their work in both content and style.

The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.

It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?

There's sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thin dime, and at least all the trains run on time but they don't go anywhere.