139 Quotes On Existentialism

In the vast realm of philosophical thought, existentialism has carved out a profound niche, challenging individuals to confront the very essence of existence, freedom, and choice. This compilation of 139 quotes on existentialism offers a curated glimpse into the minds of some of the most profound thinkers and writers who have grappled with these eternal questions. Whether you're seeking solace, pondering the absurdity of life, or exploring the depths of human freedom, these quotes will inspire, provoke, and illuminate your understanding of the human condition. Join us on this intellectual journey and delve into the complexities of existence that continue to captivate and confound us.

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. “Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” - Kurt Vonnegut

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. “Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?” - Betty Friedan

5. “Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

6. “I can't go on, I'll go on.” - Samuel Beckett

7. “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

8. “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.” - Nietzsche

9. “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

10. “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

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

12. “Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!One thing at least is certain - This Life flies;One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -The Flower that once has blown forever dies.” - Omar Khayyám

13. “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

14. “There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.” - Albert Camus

15. “Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.” - Albert Camus

16. “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

17. “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

18. “We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

19. “Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.(There is no reality except in action.)” - Jean-Paul Sartre

20. “If you want good luck; you must go out there and search for that luck!! Because luck is waiting for you to look for it.” - Temitope Owosela

21. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

22. “When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.” - Noah Cicero

23. “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

24. “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

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

26. “But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgments! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress...” - Friedrich Nietzsche

27. “You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

28. “You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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

30. “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

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

32. “All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.” - David M. Eagleman

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

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

35. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” - David M. Eagleman

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “cinta mengungkapkan kualitaskualitas besar dan tersembunyi dari pencintanya--apa yang langka dan merupakan perkecualian dari dirinya: dalam artian bahwa cinta menyembunyikan apa yang biasabiasa saja” - Friedrich Nietzsche

40. “perempuan belajar membenci dengan cara yang sama saat mereka--belajar melupakan cara memperdaya” - Friedrich Nietzsche

41. “hati terikat, jiwa bebas.--jika kau mengikat dan merantai hatimu kuatkuat, kau dapat memberikan banyak kebebasan pada jiwamu: itulah yang ku katakan pada suatu hari. akan tetapi orangorang tidak percaya, kecuali saat mereka benarbenar menemukannya” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

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

45. “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

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

47. “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

48. “apa yang dilakukan demi cinta, selalu terjadi diluar kebaikan dan kejahatan” - Friedrich Nietzsche

49. “kegilaan adalah suatu yang langka dalam individu--tapi dalam kelompok, partai politik, negara, epos, ia adalah peraturan...” - Friedrich Nietzsche

50. “untuk hidup sendirian, orang harus menjadi binatang atau dewa--kata Aristoteles. ada yang ketiga: orang harus menjadi keduanya, yaitu seorang filsuf” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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

52. “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

53. “kalau diinjak cacing akan bergelung. ini cerdik. dengan demikian berkurangnya peluang diinjak lagi. dalam bahasa moral: tahu diri” - Friedrich Nietzsche

54. “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

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

56. “In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.” - Werner Herzog

57. “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

58. “Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.” - Bertrand Russell

59. “There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

60. “Me parece que de nada vale correr si siempre ha de irse por el mismo camino, cerrado, de nuestra personalidad. Unos seres nacen para vivir, otros para trabajar, y otros para mirar la vida. Yo tenia un pequeño y ruin papel de espectadora. Imposible salirme de él. Imposible libertarme. Una tremenda congoja fue para mí lo único real en aquellos momentos.” - Carmen Laforet

61. “Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute.” - Stephen A. Diamond

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

63. “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

64. “One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

65. “Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.” - Rollo May

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.” - Paul Tillich

70. “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

71. “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

72. “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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

74. “Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.” - Jules Renard

75. “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

76. “This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?” - Henri Alain-Fournier

77. “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

78. “Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.” - Soren Kieekegaard

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

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

81. “At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).” - Viktor Emil Frankl

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

83. “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

84. “We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.” - Wallace Stegner

85. “Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.” - W. Somerset Maugham

86. “Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?''It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?''What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...''No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.'Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks:'There was Manicheanism...''Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...'Snow pondered for a while:'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.'I kept on:'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...''We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.''If you're going to take what I say literally...'...Snow asked abruptly:'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

87. “Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.” - Alexander McCall Smith

88. “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

89. “Death is a continuation of my life without me...” - Jean-Paul Sartre

90. “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

91. “As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.” - Albert Camus

92. “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

93. “What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

94. “For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.” - Vladimir Nabokov

95. “What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

96. “J'ai envie de partir, de m'en aller quelque part où je serais vraiment à ma place, où je m'emboîterais... Mais ma place n'est nulle part; je suis de trop.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

97. “Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.” - Steven L. Peck

98. “[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.” - Steven L. Peck

99. “It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.” - Steven L. Peck

100. “It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.” - Steven L. Peck

101. “To choose not to choose is still a choice for which you alone are responsible.” - Gary Cox

102. “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

103. “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” - Samuel Beckett

104. “The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.” - Cormac McCarthy

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

106. “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

107. “Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.” - Jane Hamilton

108. “After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.” - David Mitchell

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

110. “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

111. “The supernatural is not as it claims, for it is inherently unnatural; it seeks to separate us from our natural world.” - Joe Iacovino

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

113. “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

114. “the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.” - Paul Bowles

115. “I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “I know we didn't accomplish anything, but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things.” - Stephen Chbosky

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

122. “I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.” - Hunter S. Thompson

123. “Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.” - Albert Camus

124. “Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.” - Jim Holt

125. “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

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

127. “We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening” - Chuang Tzu

128. “That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day.” - Gregory Galloway

129. “To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.” - Haruki Murakami

130. “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

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

132. “But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.” - Knut Hamsun

133. “If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.” - Albert Camus

134. “You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. you see a women, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

135. “To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.” - Albert Camus

136. “They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.” - Paulo Coelho

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

138. “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

139. “You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.” - Isaac Hooke