Browsing Topic Best Existentialism Quotes

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

My favorite word is existentialism. I can’t say it and I’m not quite sure what it means.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

Time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

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

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.

Il n’y a de réalité que dans l’action. (There is no reality except in action.)

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

One fast move or I’m gone,’ I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can’t learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with –

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

I have resigned from the professional undertaking of coin flipping. I am not here to tell you where gold’s going to be. I have no idea. That’s my existentialism. I am a student of uncertainty, I have no idea where the stock market is going to be. So when I am creating trades in my portfolio for my clients, I am agnostic. I just want to enhance the probability that I make money come what may.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.