Existentialism quotes

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

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.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Life is a dead-end street.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Death is a fearful thing.

Every man is his own hell.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

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?‘

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

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

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.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

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

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

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.

Why am I here? I’m not lucky. That’s God.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

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.

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

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

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.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

Such as we are made of, such we be.

The lie is a condition of life.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

Man is a universe within himself.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

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.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

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.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

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.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

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

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Man – a being in search of meaning.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

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

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.