Quotes About Existentialism

Political operatives don't tend to be existentialists. They do know, however, that if a supporter doesn't vote, then his or her opinion does not make a sound - or a difference.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.

Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?

You see—I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters.

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.

el problema de vivir más allá de tu mejor tiempo vital, más allá del punto en que la vida ya no reporta alegría, sino tan sólo desilusión y sucesos horribles.

I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. And one of the few side benefits of that is you know you're not going to go to hell for filling in the wrong answers in the crossword. Because you've been to hell and back already and you know all too well what it's like.

If one accepted such reasoning, I who had lost my face was destined to be shut up forever in a solitary cell … with no roadway … and so a mask became invested with a terribly profound meaning.

Perhaps there is no such thing as a cruel future. The future, properly speaking, is already cruel by virtue of being the future. The responsibility for this cruelty lies not on the side of the future, but on that of a present unable to accept the abyss that separates the two.

The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: "Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?

although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

I'm not myself, she said and then laughed maniacally, but God knows who I am.

Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

There is not a single spot between Christianity and atheism, upon which a man can firmly fix his foot.

"To think the way you do," he said smiling, "you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope." "On both, perhaps."

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.