Existentialism Quotes - Page 3

• 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.

  Hermann Hesse

  Flower, Fall, Heart

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Narcissus and Goldmund: A Novel”, p.157, Macmillan

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• There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Meaningful, Atheist, Responsibility

  "The God Delusion". Book by Richard Dawkins, October 2, 2006.

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• I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

  Meg Ryan

  Good Life, Existential Angst, Complaining

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• The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence.

  Paul Tillich

  Attitude, Existence, Situation

  Paul Tillich (1988). “Writings on religion”

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• Everything is true, and nothing is true!

  Albert Camus

  Stranger

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Stranger”, p.91, Vintage

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• One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

  Saul Bellow

  Murder, Psychiatrist

  Saul Bellow (1976). “Herzog”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• 

  It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

  Albert Camus

  Falling In Love, Despair, Feels

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• The point is there ain't no point.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Nihilism, No Point

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• Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.

  Martin Heidegger

  Doe, Facts, Relation

  Martin Heidegger, Joan Stambaugh, Dennis J. Schmidt (2010). “Being and Time”, p.11, SUNY Press

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• I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Distance, Thinking, Sky

  Simone de Beauvoir (2011). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”, p.6, Open Road Media

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• Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws- laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit- given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.

  PZ Myers

  Law, Special, Important

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• It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

  Mark Haddon

  Believe, Evil, World

  FaceBook post by Mark Haddon from Jan 16, 2017

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• You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

  Albert Camus

  Inspirational, Life, Happiness

  "Youthful Writings". Book by Albert Camus, October 1932.

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• As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Long, Philosopher

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.61, Open Road Media

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• In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Loathing, Consciousness

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “The Birth of Tragedy”, p.65, Friedrich Nietzsche

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• Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

  Archie Shepp

  Ideas, Musical, Culture

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

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Men, Firsts, Understood

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2012). “Essays in Aesthetics”, p.14, Open Road Media

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• From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Philosophy, Ambiguity, Defined

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.62, Open Road Media

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• We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

  Charles Bukowski

  Love, Death, Novelists

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “The Captain is Out to Lunch”, p.10, Harper Collins

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• The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Sheep, Want, Littles

  Antoine De Saint-Exupery (2015). “The Little Prince: "Illustrated Edition"”, p.26, eKitap Projesi

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• Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Doe, Addresses

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.134, Open Road Media

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• Depression is the inability to construct a future.

  Rollo May

  Sad, Depression, Depressing

  "Love and Will". Book by Rollo May, ch. 9, 1969.

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• At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

  Albert Camus

  Sky, Tree, Looks

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• The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Individual, Claims, Dissent

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• I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

  Mike White

  Thinking, Culture, Sometimes

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