Existentialism:
From Despair to Freedom Posted on July 6, 2013 by The Quotesome Team
The philosophy of existentialism has made a profound impact upon the team here at Quotesome. It dates back to the first time Michelle read The Stranger by Albert Camus and began to explore existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. She had a lot of sleepless nights and would stay up until sunrise jotting down eye-opening quotes from her readings. The eventual flood of quotes she had gathered were what inspired the idea of Quotesome.
Through existentialism we learned to take full control of our lives. Through existentialism we learned that there is no formula for life– you can choose to live your life however you wish and it wont render your life any more or less valid than anybody else’s. Through existentialism we found the courage to ditch the lives that were expected of us (graduate from college and get a respectable job) to work on Quotesome. As a token of appreciation, we’ve put together a list of quotes about Existentialism. We encourage you to bookmark this page and refer to it whenever you feel like you are straying away from yourself, or simply to replenish yourself with vigor for life.
Not all the quotes deal with existentialism from an immediate philosophical standpoint. In fact, most of the quotes capture the “feeling” of existentialism that arise from the stages of an existential crisis. There is no point in trying to label existentialism as a “bleak” or “positive” philosophy– in the spirit of existentialism, it is up to the individual to decide whether they wish to persist in despair or emerge from it.
You are free and that is why you are lost.
— Franz Kafka
Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
— Rosencrantz (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) collect this quote
This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time.
— Chuck Palahniuk
As if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
— Albert Camus
You are the music while the music lasts.
— T. S. Eliot
To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life’s neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
— Carl Sagan
Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there’s no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice that ensures that a loser’s luck will turn around. The universe doesn’t care one whit whether you’ve been winning or losing; each roll of the dice is just like every other.
— Charles Seife
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
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
— Franz Kafka
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, Calvin and Hobbes
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
— Jack Kerouac
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
— Kurt Vonnegut
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.
— Albert Camus
It’s a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can’t predict and we can’t control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.
— Rudy Rucker
Life begins on the other side of despair.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I love life. And I do not believe that my life serves a purpose. I do not believe that my life has any meaning.
— Michelle Lara Lin
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
— Paul Gauguin
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
— Woody Allen
It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything.
— Tyler Durden
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.
— Albert Camus
It wasn’t the New World that mattered … Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
— Carl Sagan
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
— Carl Sagan
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
— Henry David Thoreau
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
— Steve Jobs
Do not search for the meaning of life around you; it is self-defined. If you are given the chance to make a choice, would you surrender the opportunity to your surroundings? It is often incorrect and will be far worse than whatever you could create for yourself. Be your own deciding factor.
— Lawrence Beall
I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.
— Woody Allen
Let us do something, while we have the chance! … Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!
— Samuel Beckett
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
— Umberto Eco
Walking through the city streets… Is it by mistake or design?
— Lana Del Rey
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
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.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?
— Leo Tolstoy
Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn’t trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. 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. There you’ve got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
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
A cage went in search of a bird.
— Franz Kafka
It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.
— Desiderius Erasmus
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.
— Jean Genet
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
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, loves, studies – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly… But then, we find we won’t actually die that evening, and we don’t do any of the things we dreamed, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed death to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
— Marcel Proust
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over.
— Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
We are not restricted. No boundaries have been defined, no inhibitions imposed. We have, for the while, secured, or blundered into, our release, for the while. Spontaneity and whim are the order of the day. Other wheels are turning but they are not our concern. We can breathe. We can relax. We can do what we like and say what we like to whomever we like, without restriction.
— Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
— Chuck Palahniuk
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
— Chuck Palahniuk
There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
— Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
— Oscar Wilde
There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.
— Jim Morrison
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
— Richard Dawkins
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
— Soren Kierkegaard
My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call “happiness.” There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go.
— Arthur Miller
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
— Viktor E. Frankl
I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.
— David Lynch
Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
— Christopher Hitchens
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
If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I’ve ever had, does money really even matter?
— Tim Ross
Why does man create? Is it man’s purpose on earth to express himself, to bring form to thought, and to discover meaning in experience? Or is it just something to do when he’s bored?
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Let’s say that life is this square of the sidewalk. We are born at this crack and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square and in the process of walking outside of it. Suddenly, we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
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.
— Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
There’s nothing stopping you from doing anything. There’s nothing stopping you from jumping off a cliff. People see this as a huge problem, but that’s because you’re looking at it from one perspective. There’s also nothing stopping you from falling in love, living happily, pursuing your goals, trying new things, laughing, smiling, loving, caring, helping, etc… but most people get stuck on the “what’s stopping me from jumping off a cliff?” – Nothing. There’s also nothing stopping you from finding a reason to live, and knowing that death will come eventually, but happiness is a choice you make to pursue and live in.
— EtovNowd (Redditor)
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
— Cornelia Funke
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
— Stanley Kubrick
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only journey is the one within.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
— Ernest Becker
Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.
— Kirk Schneider
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
— Stanley Kubrick
Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there’s no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice that ensures that a loser’s luck will turn around. The universe doesn’t care one whit whether you’ve been winning or losing; each roll of the dice is just like every other.
— Charles Seife
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.
— P. Z. Myers
None of which is to say that life is devoid of purpose and meaning. Only that these are things we create, not things we discover out there in the fundamental architecture of the world. The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it’s up to use to make sense of it and give it value.
— Sean Carroll
A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.
— Rudy Rucker
If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
— Charles Bukowski
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.
— Martin Heidegger
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
— Martin Heidegger
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
— Joan Didion
But how could you live and have no story to tell?
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
The point is there ain’t no point.
— Cormac McCarthy
A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.
— Lawrence M. Krauss
This Nothingness that you’re fearing, is precisely the one thing that makes your life so worth living. This lack of meaning to life grants you the authority as the sole junta, totalitarian, and dictator of your own journey.
— Michelle Lara Lin
Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
— Anonymous (frequently misattributed to Albert Camus)
I’m significant! … Screamed the dust speck.
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.
— Haruki Murakami
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.
— Irvine Welsh
What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come
— Samuel Beckett
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
— Vladimir Nabokov
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.
— Blaise Pascal
Life … is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
— William Shakespeare
Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
— Walter Kaufmann
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
You share this earth with fellow lost beings. Many of them have not even considered their own existence and how meaningless the actions they perform are. Many of them do not believe to be lost. Being hostile towards those who do not realize they are lost is not beneficial to anyone. Respect others, some don’t wish to see the light. It doesn’t mean you throw a flood light on them. And so what if you think someone isn’t useful in anyway whatsoever it doesn’t give you the right to judge. We are ALL pointless. No need to get a ruler and figure out how much more pointless one is to the next.
— ihearthaters (Redditor)
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
— Stanley Kubrick
From Despair to Freedom Posted on July 6, 2013 by The Quotesome Team
The philosophy of existentialism has made a profound impact upon the team here at Quotesome. It dates back to the first time Michelle read The Stranger by Albert Camus and began to explore existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. She had a lot of sleepless nights and would stay up until sunrise jotting down eye-opening quotes from her readings. The eventual flood of quotes she had gathered were what inspired the idea of Quotesome.
Through existentialism we learned to take full control of our lives. Through existentialism we learned that there is no formula for life– you can choose to live your life however you wish and it wont render your life any more or less valid than anybody else’s. Through existentialism we found the courage to ditch the lives that were expected of us (graduate from college and get a respectable job) to work on Quotesome. As a token of appreciation, we’ve put together a list of quotes about Existentialism. We encourage you to bookmark this page and refer to it whenever you feel like you are straying away from yourself, or simply to replenish yourself with vigor for life.
Not all the quotes deal with existentialism from an immediate philosophical standpoint. In fact, most of the quotes capture the “feeling” of existentialism that arise from the stages of an existential crisis. There is no point in trying to label existentialism as a “bleak” or “positive” philosophy– in the spirit of existentialism, it is up to the individual to decide whether they wish to persist in despair or emerge from it.
You are free and that is why you are lost.
— Franz Kafka
Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
— Rosencrantz (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) collect this quote
This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time.
— Chuck Palahniuk
As if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
— Albert Camus
You are the music while the music lasts.
— T. S. Eliot
To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life’s neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
— Carl Sagan
Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there’s no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice that ensures that a loser’s luck will turn around. The universe doesn’t care one whit whether you’ve been winning or losing; each roll of the dice is just like every other.
— Charles Seife
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
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
— Franz Kafka
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, Calvin and Hobbes
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
— Jack Kerouac
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
— Kurt Vonnegut
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.
— Albert Camus
It’s a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can’t predict and we can’t control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.
— Rudy Rucker
Life begins on the other side of despair.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I love life. And I do not believe that my life serves a purpose. I do not believe that my life has any meaning.
— Michelle Lara Lin
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
— Paul Gauguin
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
— Woody Allen
It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything.
— Tyler Durden
People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.
— Albert Camus
It wasn’t the New World that mattered … Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
— Carl Sagan
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
— Carl Sagan
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
— Henry David Thoreau
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
— Steve Jobs
Do not search for the meaning of life around you; it is self-defined. If you are given the chance to make a choice, would you surrender the opportunity to your surroundings? It is often incorrect and will be far worse than whatever you could create for yourself. Be your own deciding factor.
— Lawrence Beall
I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.
— Woody Allen
Let us do something, while we have the chance! … Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!
— Samuel Beckett
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
— Umberto Eco
Walking through the city streets… Is it by mistake or design?
— Lana Del Rey
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
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.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?
— Leo Tolstoy
Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn’t trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. 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. There you’ve got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
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
A cage went in search of a bird.
— Franz Kafka
It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.
— Desiderius Erasmus
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.
— Jean Genet
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
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, loves, studies – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly… But then, we find we won’t actually die that evening, and we don’t do any of the things we dreamed, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed death to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
— Marcel Proust
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over.
— Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
We are not restricted. No boundaries have been defined, no inhibitions imposed. We have, for the while, secured, or blundered into, our release, for the while. Spontaneity and whim are the order of the day. Other wheels are turning but they are not our concern. We can breathe. We can relax. We can do what we like and say what we like to whomever we like, without restriction.
— Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
— Chuck Palahniuk
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
— Chuck Palahniuk
There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
— Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
— Oscar Wilde
There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.
— Jim Morrison
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
— Richard Dawkins
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
— Soren Kierkegaard
My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call “happiness.” There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go.
— Arthur Miller
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
— Viktor E. Frankl
I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.
— David Lynch
Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
— Christopher Hitchens
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
If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I’ve ever had, does money really even matter?
— Tim Ross
Why does man create? Is it man’s purpose on earth to express himself, to bring form to thought, and to discover meaning in experience? Or is it just something to do when he’s bored?
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Let’s say that life is this square of the sidewalk. We are born at this crack and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square and in the process of walking outside of it. Suddenly, we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
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.
— Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)
There’s nothing stopping you from doing anything. There’s nothing stopping you from jumping off a cliff. People see this as a huge problem, but that’s because you’re looking at it from one perspective. There’s also nothing stopping you from falling in love, living happily, pursuing your goals, trying new things, laughing, smiling, loving, caring, helping, etc… but most people get stuck on the “what’s stopping me from jumping off a cliff?” – Nothing. There’s also nothing stopping you from finding a reason to live, and knowing that death will come eventually, but happiness is a choice you make to pursue and live in.
— EtovNowd (Redditor)
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
— Cornelia Funke
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
— Stanley Kubrick
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only journey is the one within.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
— Ernest Becker
Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.
— Kirk Schneider
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
— Stanley Kubrick
Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there’s no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice that ensures that a loser’s luck will turn around. The universe doesn’t care one whit whether you’ve been winning or losing; each roll of the dice is just like every other.
— Charles Seife
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.
— P. Z. Myers
None of which is to say that life is devoid of purpose and meaning. Only that these are things we create, not things we discover out there in the fundamental architecture of the world. The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it’s up to use to make sense of it and give it value.
— Sean Carroll
A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.
— Rudy Rucker
If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
— Charles Bukowski
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.
— Martin Heidegger
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
— Martin Heidegger
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
— Joan Didion
But how could you live and have no story to tell?
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
The point is there ain’t no point.
— Cormac McCarthy
A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.
— Lawrence M. Krauss
This Nothingness that you’re fearing, is precisely the one thing that makes your life so worth living. This lack of meaning to life grants you the authority as the sole junta, totalitarian, and dictator of your own journey.
— Michelle Lara Lin
Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
— Anonymous (frequently misattributed to Albert Camus)
I’m significant! … Screamed the dust speck.
— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.
— Haruki Murakami
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.
— Irvine Welsh
What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come
— Samuel Beckett
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
— Vladimir Nabokov
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.
— Blaise Pascal
Life … is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
— William Shakespeare
Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
— Walter Kaufmann
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
You share this earth with fellow lost beings. Many of them have not even considered their own existence and how meaningless the actions they perform are. Many of them do not believe to be lost. Being hostile towards those who do not realize they are lost is not beneficial to anyone. Respect others, some don’t wish to see the light. It doesn’t mean you throw a flood light on them. And so what if you think someone isn’t useful in anyway whatsoever it doesn’t give you the right to judge. We are ALL pointless. No need to get a ruler and figure out how much more pointless one is to the next.
— ihearthaters (Redditor)
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
— Stanley Kubrick
