Quotes About Existentialism

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Debería estar completamente solo en este mundo, yo, Steiner, sin ninguna otra criatura. Sin sol, sin cultura. Yo, desnudo sobre una gran piedra sin tormentas, sin nieve, sin bancos, sin dinero, sin tiempo y sin respiración. Entonces, por fin, dejaría de tener miedo.

My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that's all. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

I have always found that hell is other people.

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.

The lover's discourse is in a sense a series of No Exits

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer.

This is Nietzsche's fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.

The first thing to say about that which is is simply: it is. As Parmenides in ancient Greece formulated the principle: what is, is. Or, in Ayn Rand's words: existence exists.

Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!

Oh, sure. Of course, they say now that we've got Freud and the motorcar, God is dead." "He's not dead; just very tired.

What do I want? Why is that simple question - four little words - so impossible to answer?

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

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

Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?

The meaning of life is life itself

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding.... They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page. Something in his writing... allows me approximations, intuitions, half-dreams, but never total comprehension.... Kafka offers me absolute uncertainties which fit so many of my own.

And to think, Will Farnaby commented, to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.

in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.

I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn't quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.