Quotes About Existentialism

If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.

I have all the poems stashed away' ... 'You were very thoughtful about them, Hem. It is not that things should be published. But I believe now that it is important that they exist. We've both existed quite a lot haven't we Hem?

Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren't really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they're neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they're unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive.

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don't know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it's ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

Prenez un cercle, caressez-le, il deviendra vicieux.

Je meurs, vous entendez, je veux dire que je meurs, je n'arrive pas à le dire, je ne fais que de la littérature.

Continuându-ÅŸi lectura, Domnul Smith, plesc?ie.

dve stvari su za mene neprihvatljive: biti ro?en i onda umreti. samo to nisam tražio, i to nikako ne prihvatam.

Eh oui, je rêve...la vie est un rêve.

EDMUND: It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

EDMUND: [...] A fost o mare greÈ™eal? c? m-am n?scut om. M-aÈ™ fi descurcat mai bine ca pesc?ruÈ™ ori peÈ™te. AÈ™a, o s? fiu mereu un str?in care nu se simte niciodat? în largul lui, care nu doreÈ™te cu adev?rat È™i nu e dorit cu adev?rat, care nu poate s?-È™i g?seasc? niciodat? locul È™i care trebuie s? fie tot timpul un pic indr?gostit de moarte. (Eugene O'Neill - Lungul drum al zilei c?tre noapte)

It's as though a cabbage tried to investigate the causes and effects of its existence

Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Don't take this the wrong way, but I think he means you.

I say he had a propensity for 'finding himself in the right place at the right time'; yet it was almost as if he himself were an objet trouvé, for, subjectively, himself he never found, since it was not his self which he sought.

Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn't the end and there's something more, but I can't convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever.

I feel like an expressionist nihilist deep in my heart. And I think nihilism can stop the wheel from going around, around, around, around, around - saying the same thing, reacting the same way.

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

Actually, I think that 'Seinfeld' tackles the same kinds of issues as 'Six Feet Under,' just in a different way.

One of my very favorite television shows growing up was 'The Prisoner.'