90+ Quotes about Existentialism – Inspire Quotes and Sayings

Quotes about Existentialism

  1. “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” —Terence
  2. “I rebel therefore I exist.” —Albert Camus
  3. “I want my name to mean me.” —Mark Haddon
  4. “Life begins on the other side of despair.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  5. “Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.” —Confucius
  6. “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” —Wendell Berry
  7. “You are the music while the music lasts.” —T. S. Eliot
  8. “Life should be lived on the edge of life.” —Philippe Petit
  9. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  10. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  11. “You are free and that is why you are lost.” —Franz Kafka
  12. “Struggle is what it means to be alive and free.” —David Budbill
  13. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
  14. “Freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.” —Jean Paul Sartre
  15. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” —Albert Camus
  16. “Where there is injury let me sow pardon.” —St. Francis of Assisi
  17. “The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.” —Friedrich Durrenmatt
  18. “Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.” —Paul Tillich
  19. “For small creatures such as us the vastness is bearable only through love.” —Carl Sagan
  20. “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
  21. “Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.” —Joshua Loth Liebman
  22. “All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  23. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” —Lewis Carroll
  24. “Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  25. “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed —Friedrich Nietzsche
  26. “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” —William Shakespeare
  27. “To choose not to choose is still a choice for which you alone are responsible.” —Gary Cox
  28. “We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
  29. “You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  30. “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” —Soren Kierkegaard
  31. “No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
  32. “Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” —Ernest Becker
  33. “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.” —Jack Kerouac
  34. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” —Jean Paul Sartre
  35. “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
  36. “I’m trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through.” —Sean Lennon
  37. “Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.” —Marcus Aurelius
  38. “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  39. “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
  40. “I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe.” —Julia Louis-Dreyfus
  41. “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
  42. “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-Exupery
  43. “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
  44. “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.” —Rollo May
  45. “As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allow us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  46. “He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  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

Famous Quotes about Existentialism

  1. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” —Samuel Beckett
  2. “You are free and that is why you are lost.” —Franz Kafka
  3. “The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.” —Anton Chekhov
  4. “I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.” —Woody Allen
  5. “It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.” —Matthew Woodring Stover, Blade of Tyshalle
  6. “From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.” —Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
  7. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” —Samuel Beckett, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
  8. “The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” —Woody Allen
  9. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.” —Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
  10. “Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.” —Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be
  11. “Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” —Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
  12. “Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.” —Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
  13. “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  14. “The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.” —Søren Kierkegaard
  15. “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
  16. “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, Foucault’s Pendulum
  17. “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
  18. “To assume that one’s existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.” —Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society
  19. “In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits.” —John C. Lilly, The Human Biocomputer
  20. “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, The God Delusion
  21. “Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.” —Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
  22. “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.” —Søren Kierkegaard

Existentialist Quotes on Love

  1. “It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.” ―Albert Camus
  2. “I know of only one duty, and that is to love.” ―Albert Camus
  3. “For small creatures such as us the vastness is bearable only through love.” —Carl Sagan

Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes about Existentialist

  1. I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don’t want to think any more, I am because I think that I don’t want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!—Jean-Paul Sartre
  2. I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, and eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.—Jean-Paul Sartre
  3. There is no reality except in action. ― Existentialism Is a Humanism
  4. I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where? To this very moment…—Jean-Paul Sartre
  5. “Life begins on the other side of despair.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  6. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  7. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  8. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  9. “Freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.” —Jean Paul Sartre
  10. “All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  11. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” —Jean Paul Sartre
  12. “As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allow us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
  13. “He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

Albert Camus Quotes about Existentialist

  1. “There is scarcely any passion without struggle.” ―The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
  2. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” ―The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
  3. “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.” ―The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
  4. “I rebel therefore I exist.”
  5. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”

Existentialist Quotes from ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus

  • “Everything is true, and nothing is true!.”
  • “After a while you could get used to anything.”
  • “Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.”
  • “There is not love of life without despair about life.”
  • “One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know.”
  • “To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.”
  • “If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
  • “But,” I reminded myself, “it’s common knowledge that life isn’t worth living, anyhow.”
  • “Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
  • “I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
  • “I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.”
  • “I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”