Quotes About Existentialism

While the supreme value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity.

I devote Chapter 5 to the issue of a 'chastened individualism', as the existentialists try to conceive of social solidarity in a manner that will enhance rather than compromise individual freedom and responsibility, which remain non-negotiable.

existentialism represents a long tradition in the history of philosophy in the West, extending back at least to Socrates (469–399 bc). This is the practice of philosophy as 'care of the self' (epimeleia heautou). Its focus is on the proper way of acting rather than on an abstract set of theoretical truths.

Bertrand Russell, scarcely an existentialist: can anyone really believe that the revulsion they feel when they witness the gratuitous infliction of pain is simply an expression of the fact that they don't happen to like it?

With his compulsively slamming lyrics and king-of-the-world delivery, DMX intuitively echoes the existentialism of the projects of the novelist Donald Goines.

I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster.

Estamos solos. La soledad, fondo de donde brota la angustia, empezó el día en que nos desprendimos del ámbito materno y caímos en un mundo extraño y hostil. Hemos caído, y esta caída, este sabernos caídos, nos vuelve culpables. ¿De qué? De un delito sin nombre: el haber nacido.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

It's just that sometimes I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadnt had to live it.

Who is it? said the boy. I dont know. Who is anybody?

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

He spoke into a blackness without depth or dimension.

I got no reason to be afraid of God. I've even got a bone or two to pick with Him.

sometimes I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadnt had to live it.

It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.

having only learned to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies--my only talent--smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle...

But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies.

Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants?