102 Existentialism Quotes Explained

Existentialism isn't just a philosophical movement; it's a lens through which we explore the depths of human existence, freedom, and choice. Whether you're tussling with life's big questions or simply curious about the perspectives of some of history's most profound thinkers, this curated collection of the top 102 existentialism quotes offers both insight and inspiration. Each quote is not just presented but thoughtfully explained, shedding light on the intricate ideas that define existentialist thought. So, dive in and reflect on these timeless reflections that continue to influence and challenge our understanding of the human condition.

1. “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

2. “Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.” - Philip K. Dick

3. “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-Exupéry

4. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” - Albert Camus

5. “When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of them and turn it to one's own purpose and pierce through the murk, it became blunt and useless as a piece of cardboard.” - Deborah Eisenberg

6. “I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.” - Wodehouse

7. “He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.” - Graham Greene

8. “A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.” - Tom Stoppard

9. “I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.” - Woody Allen

10. “The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11. “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

12. “I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,and I have followed the source of rivers towards theirsource or plunged into forests, always making for othercities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; andI could never turn back any more than a record can spinin reverse. And all that was leading me where ?To this very moment...” - Jean-Paul Sartre

13. “Sky is not a limit for me; because I have no limit for myself in life. Because life is a world full of risk taking and possibilities. No matter how hard or easy life is; I will always find a way to enjoy myself; even in the mist of circumstances; because problems is a sense of adventure in sheep's clothing.” - Temitope Owosela

14. “A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

15. “In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

16. “I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.” - Rabih Alameddine

17. “How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.” - Andrew Sean Greer

18. “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

19. “Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?” - Andrew Sean Greer

20. “It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.” - David M. Eagleman

21. “Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.” - David M. Eagleman

22. “About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.” - Christopher Hitchens

23. “And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!” - Albert Camus

24. “he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.” - Albert Camus

25. “dalam keramahan tidak ada kebencian terhadap manusia--inilah mengapa begitu banyak hal yang menjijikkan” - Friedrich Nietzsche

26. “kedewasaan seseorang: setelah menemukan kembali keseriusaan yang pernah dimilikinya saat masih kanakkanak, saat sedang bermain.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

27. “sesuai dengan diri kita, kita semua purapura lebih sederhana dari yang sebenarnya: inilah cara dimana kita dapat bersantai dari orang lain” - Friedrich Nietzsche

28. “melalui musik, bahkan hasrat kita dapat meikmati dirinya sendiri” - Friedrich Nietzsche

29. “seseorang yag merasa dirinya ditakdirkan untuk megamati dan bukan meyakini akan menemukan bahwa semua penganut terlalu cerewet dan suka mendesak: dia akan menolak mereka” - Friedrich Nietzsche

30. “saat cinta ataupun kebencia tidak berperan, tindaka perempuan akan biasabiasa saja” - Friedrich Nietzsche

31. “Semua perempuan yang baik menemukan bahwa ilmu pengetahuan adalah bertentangan dengan kesopanan mereka. Ia membuat mereka merasa seakanakan ada orang yang ingin melihat dibalik kulit mereka--atau yang lebih parah! Dibalik pakaian dan kosmetik mereka...” - Friedrich Nietzsche

32. “dari sekolah militer kehidupan: apa yang tidak membunuhku membuatku kuat” - Friedrich Nietzsche

33. “kepuasan diri melindungi orang bahkan dari terkena pilek. pernahkah seorang perempuan yang tahu bahwa ia berpakaian pantas terkena pilek? saya asumsikan dia hampir tidak berpakaian samasekali” - Friedrich Nietzsche

34. “perempuan dianggap dalam. kenapa? karena orang tidak akan menemukan dasar pada mereka. perempuan bahkan tidak dangkal” - Friedrich Nietzsche

35. “apa gunanya bahwa saya terbukti benar? saya berada di sisi kebenaran?--dan dia yang tertawa pertamakali hari ini, juga akan tertawa yang terakhir” - Friedrich Nietzsche

36. “We are gods with anuses.” - Ernest Becker

37. “Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.” - Simone de Beauvoir

38. “Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” - Ernest Becker

39. “What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.” - Ernest Becker

40. “A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.” - Rollo May

41. “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

42. “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

43. “the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith” - Ernest Becker

44. “When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.” - Rollo May

45. “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

46. “Without awareness, we are not truly alive.” - James F. T. Bugental

47. “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

48. “Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.” - Stephen A. Diamond

49. “Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.” - Simone de Beauvoir

50. “The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.” - Simone de Beauvoir

51. “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

52. “It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.” - Rollo May

53. “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

54. “There is scarcely any passion without struggle.” - Albert Camus

55. “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

56. “It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.” - Simone de Beauvoir

57. “A shaft of sweetness shoots through me from top to toe when the sun rises; I shoulder my gun in silent exaltation.” - Knut Hamsun

58. “It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

59. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.” - Ernest Becker

60. “We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual.” - Viktor Frankl

61. “[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

62. “We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.” - Susan Moody

63. “What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.” - Stanisław Lem

64. “I want to see the world without explaining away its mystery by calling things wicked, righteous, sinful, and good. I want to erase in myself the easy explanations, the always mendacious explanations about why things happen the way they do, and in this way, come to know the mystery of being–-not by any approximation in thought, but by being. I want to be and not be ashamed of being.” - Therese Doucet

65. “One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.” - Kurt Vonnegut

66. “Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.” - Hermann Hesse

67. “If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache.” - Stanley Kubrick

68. “The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth were but ready they would not need even to bite, the bones would crack themselves and the marrow would be freely accessible to the feeblest of dogs. If I remain faithful to this metaphor, then the goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears monstrous, it is true. For I want to compel all dogs thus to assemble together, I want the bones to crack open under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life they love, while all by myself, quite alone, I lap up the marrow. That sounds monstrous, almost as if I wanted to feed on the marrow, not merely of bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a metaphor. The marrow that I am discussing here is no food; on the contrary, it is a poison.” - Franz Kafka

69. “Deep down, it's all baseball, no matter what kind of geometrical shape you play it with.” - Vernon D. Burns

70. “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

71. “Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.” - Christian Smith

72. “Afternoon experience: autographing exposed legs, outstretched in lines like matchsticks. Afternoon epiphany: Those with smooth, hairless legs would soon lose all evidence of my contact when the sweat causes the ink from the marker to run. I am ephemeral. Skepticism would be the reaction to those with thick leg hair, as their curls frazzle the lines of my name outward illegibly. Among the scaly-legged, I flaked off immediately, like I never was at all.” - Benson Bruno

73. “When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera.” - Benson Bruno

74. “Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.” - Barnett Newman

75. “One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.” - Saul Bellow

76. “The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.” - Anton Chekhov

77. “A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross.” - Therese Doucet

78. “Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.” - Peter Wessel Zapffe

79. “If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” - Albert Camus

80. “Uncertainty is the normal state.” - Tom Stoppard

81. “Death is the ultimate negative.” - Tom Stoppard

82. “As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.” - Tom Stoppard

83. “You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” - Walker Percy

84. “I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.” - Albert Camus

85. “All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?” - Simone de Beauvoir

86. “Seeing the moving handmill, Kabir wept and said, "Alas, no one has survived the pressure of the two millstones (of the heavens and the earth). They left all their mighty empire and pomp and show behind them and but for a handful of dust no trace remains of their existence. Nobody knows about them or about what happened to them after their death -- what insects ate them up and how they fared with God. Thus alone shall one realize that this world is a transitory place and man has nothing to gain from it; it is a puppet show. Thus alone shall one find peace.” - Mir Amman

87. “We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.” - Fitzjames Stephen

88. “Life’s easy.It’s living it that’s difficult.” - Mike Sasso

89. “The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable” - Albert Camus

90. “The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.” - Albert Camus

91. “Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.” - Jim Holt

92. “Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? .....Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities…” - Ralph Ellison

93. “Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.” - Tom Perrotta

94. “Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?” - David Hewson

95. “Existence is illusory and it is eternal.” - Albert Camus

96. “The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

97. “Time is only linear for engineers and referees.” - Craig Ferguson

98. “Nothingness haunts Being.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

99. “Te leven betekent strikt genomen niets anders dan dag voor dag zelfmoord op te schuiven.” - Stig Dagerman

100. “It is good to pray even if you do not believe in God.” - Vipin Behari Goyal

101. “This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” - Albert Camus

102. “We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.” - Albert Camus