Existentialism Quotes

“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening”
― Chuang Tzu

“Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“Life’s easy.

It’s living it that’s difficult.”
― Mike Sasso

“A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.”
― Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

“If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.”
― Albert Camus

“Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“When reason has followed its road to the end, the point of crisis is reached and man is brought to the great question mark over his own existence.”
― Rudolf Karl Bultmann, Faith and Understanding

“Death is the ultimate negative.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.”
― David Mitchell

“Time is only linear for engineers and referees.”
― Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River

“You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable”
― Albert Camus

“That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day.”
― Gregory Galloway, The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand

“As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.”
― Tom Stoppard

“I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.”
― Albert Camus

“Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? .....Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities…”
― Ralph Ellison

“Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?”
― David Hewson, Macbeth

“It is good to pray even if you do not believe in God.”
― Vipin Behari Goyal, Tall man small shadow

“We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.”
― Fitzjames Stephen

“To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.”
― Haruki Murakami, Tony Takitani

“The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Te leven betekent strikt genomen niets anders dan dag voor dag zelfmoord op te schuiven.”
― Stig Dagerman, A Burnt Child

“ممدوح فرج : يعني هي حلاوة ولا شيكولاته ؟
غسان مطر : انت عايزها ايه؟”
― ممدوح فرج غسان مطر

“Seeing the moving handmill, Kabir wept and said, "Alas, no one has survived the pressure of the two millstones (of the heavens and the earth). They left all their mighty empire and pomp and show behind them and but for a handful of dust no trace remains of their existence. Nobody knows about them or about what happened to them after their death -- what insects ate them up and how they fared with God. Thus alone shall one realize that this world is a transitory place and man has nothing to gain from it; it is a puppet show. Thus alone shall one find peace.”
― Mir Amman, A Tale of Four Dervishes