Quotes About Existentialism

The power of ideas has no reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.

Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self.

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.

God. That bastard, he doesn't exist. —Samuel Beckett

NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" His point was that everything in life is choice.

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?

Our meaning comes from within. Again, in the words of Frankl, "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

The difference between structuralism and existentialism is simple: the world-constituting 'I' of existentialism is displaced by the linguistic relation between signifier and signified.

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

THE QUESTION IS WHY WOULD YOU EVER DO ANYTHING?

You decide that you will start treating Old Testament God, with all His terrible and oft-arbitrary-seeming power, as if He could also be New Testament God (even though you understand the many ways in which that is absurd). In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness—if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and arrogance.

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

Nos modos atuais de existência, há quem se sinta como um náufrago que não consegue subir à tona.

As this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself.

He belongs, as I do, to those who seek after meaning and he had discovered that meaning was no more than a gilded statue, a seven-day wonder, and a rather tasteless statue at that. … Meaning is a compulsive neurosis. It is only when the neurosis goes away, or we are cured of it, that we can live.

I quoted Menand's restatement of Kierkegaard: Anxiety is the price humans pay for freedom. My restatement of Kierkegaard and Menand is that anxiety is the price humans pay for autonoetic consciousness.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.

Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.

I don't know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.

I don't know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking

Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.