Existensialists Quotes & Sayings

Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that. — Richard Thaler

We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture, that there were eight passengers aboard the Godspeed when she pulled out of the harbour at Dunedin, and by the time the barque landed on the Coast, there were nine. The ninth was not a baby, born in transit; nor was he a stowaway; nor did the ship's lookout spot him adrift in the water, clinging to some scrap of wreckage, and give the shout to draw him in. — Eleanor Catton

Ha. Admit it: you don't have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into.
Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the finning crowd at any moment. Which she did. — Peter Heller

Shakespeare - The nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God. — Laurence Olivier

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too. — Gene Weingarten

Wherever chocolate is made, chocolate is chocolate. And any month that contains the letter a, e, i, o, or u is the proper time to share it with others. — David Augsburger

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class. — Richard Russo

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. — Norbert Wiener

I have a car that I call Flattery because it gets me nowhere. — Henny Youngman

Freedom is just chaos with better lighting — Alan Dean Foster

The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers. — John Gardner

People think happiness will simply fall into their laps. You have to aspire to it. And sometimes you have to seize it when it's kicking and screaming. — Kresley Cole

Of all the secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the most divine was humor. — Rebecca Wells