Quotes About Existentialism

Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena.

I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

He believes in No-God, and he worships him

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Che altro se non tempo, fertilità del suolo, morìa di bestie, malattie - volevo strappare la gente al circolo dentro cui era inserita? Dentro cui stava bene, non cercava nient'altro? Al che io, scattando: perché non conosce niente altro. Perché c'è qualcuno che lascia alla gente solo questa specie di domande.

I am not Hamlet. I don't play a role anymore. My words have nothing more to tell me. My thoughts suck the blood out of the images. My drama is cancelled. Behind me the set is being built. By people my drama doesn't interest, for people it doesn't concern. It doesn't interest me anymore either. I won't play along anymore.

I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.

There are nights where I cannot sleep They happen all the time In these periods, I don't want to exist Wouldn't it be nice to be no one right now? When I'm lying there, I always think of two things Sex and suicide Wouldn't it be nice to be no one right now? Sometimes I lie there and hope that I'll die right then

And I, too, am the same… only there is no love in my heart, or desire for love, no interest in work, not contentment in myself. And how remote and impossible my old religious enthusiasms seem now… and my former abounding life! What once seemed so plain and right – that happiness lay in living for others – is unintelligible now. Why live for others, when life has not attractions even for oneself?

There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.

Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

All that spring he was not himself and lived through terrible moments. "Without knowing what I am and why I'm here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live," Levin would say to himself.

Qué haré? —dije—. Es una pena suicidarse después de haber vivido noventa y nueve años sin entender nada.

She become moody and depressed. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus in the original whatever. Her eyes became interestingly pouchy and sunken.

She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus

Couldn't she see that they were all dying, that everything was futile, that the only thing to do was to live and drink and fuck whatever and whomever while you still could?

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.

These old Australians or Californians who spend all their days staring at the ocean without leaving their limousines, which they have turned into their panoramic childhood sites and their coffins, and who dream there, while awaiting the last wave, the one that will come from the depths of the ocean to engulf them.

The 'therapeutic window'. What a delicious term for the interruption of medical treatment! Might you perhaps hurl yourself into the void through this therapeutic window? How about a hermeneutic window from which to hurl yourself beyond meaning. Or an existential window from which to hurl yourself out of existence and the perpetual reasons for existing.

In this world it is much easier to hear the echo than the answer

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.