Quotes About Existentialism

Do you suspect death? If I were to suspect death I should die now

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor." —Franz Kafka, Diaries, entry of October 19, 1921

rise of computers could mean that "man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.

One can oppose the shallow optimism of so many Western thinkers and yet refuse to negate life.

The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life—that is the heart of existentialism.

existentialist

Once Ryan asked Kurt, "What are you going to do when you're thirty?" "I'm not worried about what's going to happen when I'm thirty," Kurt replied in the same tone he would use to discuss a broken spark plug, "because I'm never going to make it to thirty. You know what life is like after thirty—I don't want that.

Here's what Nietzsche said to the ceiling: "The rank of the philosopher is determined by the rank of his laughter." But he couldn't really laugh.

Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.

Jean Paul Sartre, que estaba al mando de un puesto en la Línea Maginot, escribió: «No habrá lucha, será una guerra moderna, sin masacres, igual que la pintura moderna sin asunto, la música sin melodía, la física sin materia».

If you find life absurd, shouldn't you find death precisely meaningful?

Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger.

you ever wonder why people get out of bed in the morning? why do they bother? why not just drink turpentine?

Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

Hell is people," she said. "What?" "An old android saying," she replied.

It was as if I was in a picture, a flat canvas, and everything around me was flat, me painted on like everything else: no colour, nothing in front and nothing behind me, not even earlier today or tomorrow, nothing to look back or forward to, just this moment.

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell.

For Hegel, philosophy intervenes politically by making clear the relations that already exist.

If Adler's theory of human action relates to power, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl's brand of existential psychology, "logotherapy," posits that the human species is uniquely made to seek meaning.

Lo menos frecuente en este mundo es vivir. La mayoría de la gente existe, eso es todo.