Existentialism Quotes - Page 7

• One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

  Rollo May

  Able, Readiness, Persons

  Rollo May (1994). “Existence”, p.38, Jason Aronson

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I want my name to mean me.

  Mark Haddon

  Mean, Names, Want

  7 Copy quote

• There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

  Rollo May

  Stronger, Culture, Definitions

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Strong, Opposites

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Albert Camus

  Integrity, People, Needs

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.66, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

  Bill Watterson

  Laughing, Comic Strips, Make Sense

  "The Days Are Just Packed". Book by Bill Watterson, October 1993.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Soul, Desire, Sin

  "The Devil and the Good Lord". Book by Jean-Paul Sartre, act 10, sc. 2, 1951.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sad, Men, Despair

  Walden ch. 1 (1854)

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

  Annie Dillard

  Wings, May, Bucks

  5 Copy quote

• Apparently there is no profit in the unique, or not enough to make it worthwhile to preserve. Ultimately it drains the life out of us, and existentialism starts to make more and more sense.

  Lewis Black

  Unique, Enough, Drains

  Lewis Black (2005). “Nothing's Sacred”, p.215, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Philip K. Dick

  Alive, Want, Planets

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.158, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

  David Ives

  Play, Love Relationship, Intense

  17 Copy quote

• man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

  Paul Tillich

  Men, Humanity, Essentials

  Paul Tillich (2013). “Systematic Theology”, p.32, University of Chicago Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Able, Limits, Recognition

  Simone de Beauvoir (1948). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

  Rollo May

  Art, Healing, Games

  Rollo May (1985). “My Quest for Beauty”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.

  Paul Tillich

  Thinking, Faithful, Doubt

  54 Copy quote

• All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fashion, Government, Fake

  27 Copy quote

• I rebel; therefore I exist.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Rebel

  94 Copy quote

• A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

  Andrew Sean Greer

  Heart, Night, Imagination

  5 Copy quote

• John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'

  Jack Kerouac

  Thinking, Trying, Generations

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

  Antonio Tabucchi

  Teacher, Views, Hygiene

  7 Copy quote

• Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.

  Albert Camus

  "Caligula and Cross purpose".

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.

  Joan Didion

  Regret, Eye, Men

  8 Copy quote

• Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?

  Lana Del Rey

  Mistake, Cities, Design

  Song: Born to Die, Album: Born To Die, 2012

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Jobs, Passion, Thinking

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2013). “Nausea”, p.128, New Directions Publishing

  5 Copy quote

  Show source