Quotes About Existentialism

Mailer's Negro lived in a realm of Nietzschean nihilism, of Being-for-Itself.

To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

But if one can't believe the Daily Telegraph one might as well become an Existentialist.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

Yeah. He's got a hard-on for mass murder and giving kids cancer and his big old answer to the existential clusterf*ck that is humanity is to nail his own bleeding son to a plank. That is a c*nt move. Come on, even you got to agree with me there. We should lob a f*cking nuke at him, get it over and done with. You know what I'm saying? - Butcher, 'The Boys

the true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it.

Death is nothing, and for that reason you must fear it.

Die Welt ist das Chaos. Das Nichts ist der zu gebärende Weltgott.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

The painter once believed in something, but now he paints only a hole without meaning, without anything- nothing but nothingness, the nothingness of our time.

I may look like an American WASPy doctor or lawyer, but I feel just like Woody Allen. Don't cast me for my looks - I have a very ironic, existential, crazy Jew in me.

Trying to work out where you find meaning and sense in a meaningless world is my obsession.

What I worry about ultimately is that when we're stripped of our privacy, when we're stripped of free will, when we start to merge with machines in a more robust way, at some point, we'll cease to be identifiably human. And therefore, I think our humanity is, in some ways, the thing that's under existential threat.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

If God be an infinite being, there cannot be, either in the present or future world, any relative proportion between man and his God. Thus, the idea of God can never enter the human mind.

When I thought about death in those years, I didn't quite believe in it.

I felt ill at ease with all this air about me, lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects.

We're not beginning...to...to...mean something? Mean something? You and I mean something?

Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, 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.

At no moment do I know what Im talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how, nor why, but I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of the fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means.

What about hanging ourselves? Hmm. It'd give us an erection. An erection! With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that? Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Anything worse than what I do, without knowing what, or why, I have never been able to conceive, and that doesnt surprise me, for I never tried. For had I been able to conceive something worse than what I had I would have known no peace until I got it, if I know anything about myself.

But is it true love, in the rectum? Thats what bothers me sometimes.

I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of how shall I say, I dont know.