Quotes About Existentialism

La mort m'eut semblé un moindre suicide

Prin angoasa în faÈ›a morÈ›ii experiment?m autenticitatea în cel mai înalt grad.

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, I fuck therefore I am.

I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.

What is your story sir? I said. That is the dilemma, he replied. I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.

A man needs understanding because he is existentially alone. He stares into the darkness. That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know another.

Why, an old, mangy dog, warming himself at the hearth, and struggling to his feet with a little whimper to welcome his master home—why, that dog has more memories than I! At least he recognizes his master. His master. But what can I call mine?

So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning marl. Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.

It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other's imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine.

L'enfer, c'est les autres.

Existence is an imperfection.

One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way . In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way : I was In the way for eternity.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.