Quotes About Existentialism

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it.

Ich verbrenne, so wie ich mein ganzes Leben lnag verbrannt bin. Ich weiß nicht, was das heißt.

Suicide is an escape from life. What is life? An escape from death. This means that each of us must die twice. There is the death waiting for us ahead, and the death that comes pursuing from behind.... Once you are free at least from the death that comes pursuing you, you can relax and enjoy life as you go along.

What I mean is, even a dumbass like me can think everything's pointless. Why do I get up and eat? It all ends up shit anyway. Why am I going to school and studying? Even if I happen to succeed I'm going to die anyway. You wear nice clothes, you seek respect, you make a lot of money, but what's the point? It's all pointless. But… but, you see, we still have emotions like joy and happiness, right? They may not amount to much but they fill up our emptiness.

in what myth does a man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be. "Do you live in it?" I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me it is not what I live by. "Then do we no longer have any myth?" "No, evidently we no longer have any myth." "But then what is your myth – the myth in which you do live?" At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.

O tempo é a minha matéria. O tempo presente, os homens presentes, a vida presente.

It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought about the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system could itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us. Tragedy & Hope p. 1275

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.

Sometimes I feel like I'm actually on the wrong planet. It's great when I'm in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, 'What the hell am I doing here?

If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

George R.R. Martin

Speaking for the grotesques," he said, "I beg to differ. Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don't know how to live, that you will never know." -from "A Man Asleep

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man is by necessity uncertain.

As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach.

What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude?...I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me...

I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.

One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -