Quotes About Existentialism

I thought of telling them about the computer tally, the time-factored death I carried in my chromosomes and blood. Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.

This must be how people escape the pull of the earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying.

You may not be interested in absurdity, she said firmly, but absurdity is interested in you.

I spoke to Sylvia. Do you think this is a good life?

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS

is death really so terrible a thing?

But that goes for most of us, doesn't it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it's all about? Let's dream on. Yes, that's my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantel piece...I go to work at eight and come home at five-thirty. When I retire they will give me a clock--with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me. Go away: I've forgotten you already.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

what does it matter if I've become mute in a world where there is no one to talk to?

I rightly pass for an atheist.

Essayez, si vous le pouvez, d'arrêter un homme qui voyage avec son suicide à la boutonnière.

Yo seré un gran muerto.

Mon livre de chevet, c'est un revolver. Mi libro de cabecera es un revólver.

I am an "unrealized" character, dramatically speaking...

And no one realizes we should all, always, look like that, each with his eyes full of horror at his own, inescapable solitude.

When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls. . . . But now you must listen to me for the last time. . . . For the last time I say. . . . Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside.

Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment's respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.

Un raspuns este intotdeauna o forma a mortii - Eu cred ca intrebarile sunt o forma a vietii.

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror

Under the silver nailparing of a moon. I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.

We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning--and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal--to realise ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, I possess this now, therefore I am happy, instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.

I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.