Quotes About Existentialism

Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought.

This is ridiculous. I don't belong here. No one belongs here.

Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness. (essay : Hölderlin And The Essence Of Poetry, chapter from my copy of The origin of the work of art)

Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht.

Only a god can save us.

What could be more alien to the they, lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the nothing?

Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.

Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened.

Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is terror-inducing, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth.

El deseo de una ética se vuelve tanto más apremiante cuanto más aumenta, hasta la desmesura, el desconcierto el hombre, tanto el manifiesto como el que permanece oculto.

What is decision anyway?

It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him,six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.

If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend mine reflecting on it.

Both life and nature are black.

That may be true, I thought, But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive? Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: I Love the 80s on VH1.

If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it?

And suddenly, for the first time this day, we remembered that we are the damned. We remembered it, and we laughed.

The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find a meaning in life, but to prove to them that there isn't any

Unease flickered in his eyes. "It's not so straightforward," I said in a deliberately light tone. "I don't mean the traditional God of terrestrial beliefs. I'm no specialist in religion, and I may not have come up with anything new, but do you happen to know if there ever existed a faith in… a defective God?

A blurred region, in the heart of vastness, far from earth and heaven, with no ground underfoot, no vault of sky overhead, nothing. I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is clothed in a dead, formless substance - or rather I have no body, I am that alien matter.