Quotes About Existentialism

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

The obvious question: Was it better to die now or go on living ashamed of the fact that you were still alive? Why wasn't that on the SATs? Compare and constrast.

No soy nada…, no soy nada…» se repite una y otra vez, mientras, la oscuridad es absorbida por su piel, los latidos de su corazón, como sonidos de una antigua maquinaria de relojería, traquetean en sus oídos.

When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past—and about the future only as far as that it is death.

It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

Any person who becomes aware even for a moment, of the fundamental, essential aloneness of himself as an individual, must feel insecure.

With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.

So I thought. Are you happy? What's that? Don't you know yet? But who really knows what it is? Dancing on the head of a pin, maybe.

What was the use trying to make safe and sure our little life? Sooner or later the great wave must come and sweep all away.

Ja sam moderan ?ovek i vrlo sam sklon samouništenju.

Wir sind überflüssig für uns selbst

Kaži mi, Georg - pitam kad smo skrenuli u Hakenštrase, - Jesi li ti stvarno sre?an? Georg Krol skine šešir ne?emu nevidljvom u no?i. -Drugo pitanje! - kaže on. - Koliko se može izdržati sede?i na vrhu igle?

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.

Via?a este un vis... realitatea este cenu?ie ?i goal?...

Life was life, it was worth nothing and everything;

La réalité n'a pas de solution, Anastasie.

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

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Why are groups so blind and stupid?" men have always asked. "Because they demand illusions," answered Freud. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real. And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one's own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom

It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.

modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength.