To be, or not to be, that is the question.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

Life is a dead-end street.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I bear a charmed life.

Every man is his own hell.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

If music be the food of love, play on.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

Death is a fearful thing.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

To be is to do.

Man is a universe within himself.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

The lie is a condition of life.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Now is the winter of our discontent.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Life is wasted on the living.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

To live is to think.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.