Quotes About Existentialism

It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that's a psychologist!

I did Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' once. Two months in, I remember going, 'Human beings shouldn't be forced to do or watch this play every night.' It's so dark and so bottomless.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Her existence alone was excuse enough to justify the creation of the entire world.

I love stories that frame that: This is what life is about - you don't have a clue.

Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.

Hobbes: Do you think there's a God? Calvin: Well, somebody's out to get me!

Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie - The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.

Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

The meaning of life is life itself.

I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise. Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun.

Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.

it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness...

Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything everyone did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because whenever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok-- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stweing in my own sour air.