Quotes About Existentialism

The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

In life, we weep at the thought of death. In death, perhaps we weep at the thought of life.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

Everybody knows life isn't worth living.

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

By night an atheist half believes a God.

By night an atheist half believes in God.

Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom.

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle.

She was suggesting that I separate also from my third child. She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have meaning?

La voluntad de separarse del Todo es el infierno.

The existentialists said you couldn't make decisions based on preexisting norms or codes, which were always too general for any given case. Rather, every decision you made created you. The decision (existence) comes first, and creates essence.

According to existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom: 'Death … itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inner door, whirring softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. Hidden and disguised, leaking out in a variety of symptoms, it is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts'.

Estoy entrgado a la nada. I am delivered up to nothingness.

Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

The reason why most absurdist plays take place in a no man's land with only two characters is mainly financial.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God--but to create him.

Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in another or better life.