Quotes About Existentialism

The only intelligent tactical response to life's horror is to laugh defiantly at it

To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic.

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me–but I went away– and wanted to shoot myself.

Life's existential tasks have lost the interest of reality; illusion cannot build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness which ripens to decisions. One man is curious about another, every one is undecided, and their way of escape is to say that some one must come who will do something--and then they will bet on him.

Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the household of millions upon millions.

a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.

Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has.

Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God.

What I complain of is that life is not like a novel where there are hard-hearted fathers, and goblins and trolls to fight with, enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together compared to the pallid, bloodless, glutinous nocturnal shapes with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being.

Time stands still and I with it. All the plans I form fly straight back at me, when I want to spit in my own face.

My life is utterly meaningless

for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.

The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.

My reflection on life altogether lacks meaning. I take it some evil spirit has put a pair of spectacles on my nose, one glass of which magnifies to an enormous degree, while the other reduces to the same degree.

However, a self, every instant it exists, is in process of becoming, for the self [potentially] does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become. In so far as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self; but not to be one's own self is despair.

Either the individual becomes a knight of faith by assuming the burden of the paradox, or he never becomes one.

he was a cithara-player, not a man.

For it is great to give up one's wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up, it is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up.

La angustia les resulta peligrosa a los hombres sin temple, y por eso la silencia, pero, pese a ello, renuncian a hablar de Abraham, y así lo hacen.

A fé não constitui, portanto, um impulso de ordem estética; é de outra ordem muito mais elevada, justamente porque pressupõe a resignação. Não é o instinto imediato do coração, mas o paradoxo da vida.

It is an infinite merit to be able to despair.

The despairing man who is unconscious of being in despair is, in comparison with him who is conscious of it, merely a negative step further from the truth and from salvation.

So despair, then, and your frivolity shall never more cause you to roam like an inconstant spirit, like a ghost among the ruins of a world which is yet lost to you; despair, and your spirit shall become beautiful and joyous to you once more, though you now look at it with different eyes, and your spirit, now liberated, shall vault up into the world of freedom.