Quotes About Existentialism

And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out my name as they entered me, I finally believed I was alone, felt it in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo like a thin bell.

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

Douglas Coupland

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered.

When all the options are wrong," he muttered to himself in the darkness, "what does it matter which one I choose?

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

If you think all the time every day of your life, you might as well kill yourself today and be happier tomorrow.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.

One must, in one's life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.

If you find life absurd, shouldn't you find death precisely meaningful?

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

No one here gets out alive.

What can I do now? What am I to become? How can I live in this world I'm condemned to but can't endure? They couldn't stand it either, so they made a world of their own. Well, they have each other's company, and they are heroes, whereas I'm quite alone, and have none of the qualities essential to heroism - the spirit, the toughness, the dedication. I'm back where I was as a child, solitary, helpless, unwanted, frightened.

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. Ismene: Who said that? Antigone: Hegel. Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett. Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel. Ismene: I don't think so.