Existentialism Quotes
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
Existentialism is possible only in a world where God is dead or a luxury, and where Christianity is dead.
One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.