Existentialists Quotes & Sayings

Shaggy existentialists in frayed sandals, dilettantes by the score, spies by the portfolio. — Jan Morris

all the existentialists concur that it is through our choices that we become who we are. — Gordon Marino

If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things. — Chloe Thurlow

Spirit and soul is horseshit of the worst sort. Obviously there are no fairies, no Santa Clauses, no spirits. What there is, is human goals and purposes as noted by sane existentialists. But a lot of transcendentalists are utter screwballs. — Albert Ellis

...he said apropos of nothing one day, "No talk about 'relationships,' understood?" I think I did have the presence of mind to ask, "Why?"
"It's a waste of time," he said. "The existentialists have it right. Whatever is the case, is. No amount of talk is going to change it. The only thing we have to feel responsible for to each other is to pay attention to what's happening between us. It either is or it isn't. — Janet Groth

for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. "When I behold my possibilities," Kierkegaard wrote, "I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling." Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies - the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring - and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a "school" that taught people to come to terms with the human condition. — Scott Stossel

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort. — Neel Burton

There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian ... and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom ... I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The other day Father Prior was telling me about a French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre. An existentialist. ... One phrase of his particularly struck me: 'L'enfer c'est les autres.' Do you think he meant that as a joke?"

"I don't think humor's a strong point with existentialists."

"I think it's p-p-poppycock. How can Hell be others? God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That's why the self must lose itself in love for the other. It's the self we must leave behind. Better to say Hell is the Self. L'enfer c'est moi. — Tony Hendra

Travel makes existentialists of us all. — Sarah Noffke

In this way Byron's take on the human condition becomes closer to the fractured collage of 20th century existentialists: a conflicted human nature posited within a harsh and painful environment where self-less compassion is essential to human progress, but is rewarded with torture and suffering. — George Gordon Byron

When you, existentialists, speak to me of consciousness, fear, and nothingness, I burst with laughter not because I don't agree with you, but because I must agree with you. I agreed and, loo and behold, nothing happened ... I laugh because I delight in fear, play with nothingness, and toy with responsibility. Death does not exist. — Witold Gombrowicz

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke. — Wislawa Szymborska

The existentialists' view of love is not romantic, because they do not believe in love as an abstract force or amorous sunset walks along the beach. However, Cox also said, "if your idea of romance is somewhat more gothic and stormy, full of heartache, yearning and the thwarted desire to possess breaking up, making up and breaking up again, tears before bedtime and tears in the rain, then maybe it is romantic". — Skye Cleary

There's no need to fear the oblivion after we're gone if we never cared about the oblivion that came before we were born. Cheer up. Death obsessing is for boozy existentialists and bad poets. — Tom Jokinen

Animals are happier than humans because they're like furry little existentialists, all living in the moment. Their collective motto: live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking pelt. — Richard Jeni

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do. — Guillermo Del Toro

Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long. — W. H. Auden

She's studying the Existentialists this month. Asked for a study day last week to kill an Arab on the beach. — Christopher Moore

A minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time. — David Petersen