Quotes About Existentialism

Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

Vivre me causait un ennui du réel.

To be too conscious is an illness. A real thorough going illness.

Moderns fancy themselves as more intellectually sophisticated than ancient man, yet they are often ignorant of the fact that their notions of existential angst and individual identity that they think is the erudite offerings of modern existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche, were wrestled with millennia before the chaotic narcissistic spasm of the modern period.

Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?

Ah! - dice il romantico, e indossa l'abito di un sistema estraneo di valori: - Ah! Ora sono dei vostri e non sono più solo. Ah! - dice l'esteta, e indossa lo stesso abito: - io resto solo, ma questo è un bell'abito! - l'esteta nella sfera del romanticismo rappresenta il principio del male.

There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met.

Well, he said. I hope to God I never make forty -- I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles—a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other—that kept me going.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty.

I wonder if – as I tumble towards the waves – I'll have time to get the iPhone out, hit Facebook and change my status to 'Dead'.

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.

Lo necesito. Tengo cincuenta y nueve años. Es mi último cartucho. Todavía no he visto pruebas de que exista otra vida después de ésta.

It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me.

I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.

Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our own.

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.

To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.

If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?

I grew up watching a lot of Italian and French movies, so I want to have that '70s look, in my dream movie. I want that thing that's not so much happening now, that's existentialist.

We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!

Who knows Bob's name in this outfit—let alone his lame child's? ("The last place I worked for, I was let go," recalls the bank teller. "One of my friends stopped by and asked where I was at. They said, 'She's no longer with us.' That's all. I vanished.") It's nothing personal, really. Dickens's people have been replaced by Beckett's.