Quotes About Existentialism

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

rationality can easily unveil the futility of life and lead to depression—as the stereotype of the extremely smart, but world-weary, educated man (often portrayed as a detective, philosopher, or doctor) suggests. As such, the rational worldview has its limits.

Nothing within the universe itself can exist to explain the fact that it exists.

My best day ever. Got up. Had breakfast. Bored as hell. Wasting my time. Yet yesterday was the same, and it's gone. But tomorrow may never come. And there is only today. So this is my best day and my worst day.

You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?

Može se umreti i u sun?an dan.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I?

By his monstrous way of life, he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father's voice. He could scarcely recognize as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself: - I am Stephen Dedalus

When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.

I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe, and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

I wouldn't have been born if my parents had stayed in China. Which is kind of funny. But it also just kind of fills me with this existential dread.

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.

Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.

As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.

Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse.

at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

I had fled that place in hopes of finding another that had been founded upon different principles and operated under a different order. But there was no such place, or none that I could find. It seemed the only course of action left to me was to make an end of it.

In its quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it.

In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent.

My only hope lay in my ability to make a metamorphic recovery, to accept in every way the nightmarish order of things so that I could continue to exist as a successful organism even without the protective nonsense of the mind and the imagination, the protective dream of having any kind of soul or self.

The existentialists are not irrationalists in the sense that they deny the validity of logical argument and scientific reasoning. They simply question the ability of such reasoning to access the deep personal convictions that guide our lives.

the notion of what existentialists call 'ekstatic' temporality adds a qualitative and personal dimension to the phenomenon of time-consciousness. For the existentialist, the value and meaning of each temporal dimension of lived time is a function of our attitudes and choices.

If 'time is of the essence', and the existentialist will insist that it is, then part of who we are is our manner of living the 'already' and the 'not yet' of our existence, made concrete by how we handle our immersion in the everyday.