Quotes About Existentialism

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

God is necessary, and therefore must exist...But I know that he does not and cannot exist...Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?

No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

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

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.

If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I?

There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.

To hate destructiveness one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

By night an atheist half believes in a God.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

I'm someone who's mostly dead inside but still has a little hope for something extraordinary, which, as I said, is the worst breed of human, because it means I know everything is bullshit, but that I secretly hope for the day when it might not be.

Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?

Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. Come down! they cried to him. Come down! Come down! Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. I can't, he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. Why? they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. Because then you'll stop asking for me.

Cuando quieren elevarse, ustedes miran hacia arriba; yo miro hacia abajo porque ya me encuentro en las alturas

Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

My heart is always heavy. No matter where I go, I have no pleasure. I'm hiding. Everything that I do, write and think strikes me as unworthy. And human beings are horrible, ignoble companions. I often think, furthermore, that the only thing worthy of our lofty nature is death.

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.

Jean Paul Sartre: "I needed God . . . I reached out for religion, I longed for it, it was the remedy. Had it been denied me, I would have invented it myself.