Existentialism quotes
87 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."
"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."
"But how could you live and have no story to tell?"
"Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?"
"It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside existentialism — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The point is there ain't no point."
"I rebel; therefore I exist."
"There is scarcely any passion without struggle."
"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."
"It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering."
"Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you."
"We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness."
"It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway."
"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."
"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."
"From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity."
"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
"The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it."
"Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt."
"Words are loaded pistols."
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent."
"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."
"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."
"The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."
"Death is a continuation of my life without me."
