Quotes About Existentialism

To exist is simply to he there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them.

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.

Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared.

Reflection poisons desire.

But you looked much more like a fellow who had just realised that he has been living on ideas that don't pay.

I have no taste for work any longer, I can do nothing more except wait for night. 530: Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.

The distance between the being and the conscience is the nothing

No doctrine is more optimistic [than existentialism], since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself.

I shall never sleep again. But then—how shall I endure my own company?

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

I am free,' he said suddenly. And his joy changed, on the spot, to a crushing sense of anguish.

She is dearer to me than life. But her suffering comes from within, and only she can rid herself of it. For she is free.

freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.

We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

And every man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?" And if he does not say that to himself, he is masking his anguish. There is no question here of the kind of anguish which would lead to quietism, to inaction. It is a matter of a simple sort of anguish that anybody who has had responsibilities is familiar with.

Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's life without a break.

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.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

what we might call everyday morality is exclusive of ethical anguish.

An existant can never justify the existence of another existant.

Das Leben hat a priori keinen Sinn. Ehe Sie leben, ist das Leben nichts; es liegt bei Ihnen, ihm einen Sinn zu verleihen, und der Wert ist nichts anderes als der Sinn, den Sie wählen.

You believe that you believe, but you don't believe.