Existentialism Quotes

I'm a card-carrying existentialist.

— Zawe Ashton

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

— Catherine Camus

The absurd is sin without God.

— Albert Camus

Life is fragile and absurd.

— Leo Tolstoy

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

— David Lynch

Annihilation is an absurdity in terms.

— Bernard Palissy

Nothingness haunts Being.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.

— James Anthony Froude

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

— Woody Allen

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

— Julio Cortazar

Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment.

— Jonathan Nolan

Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.

— Chuck Klosterman

We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening

— Anonymous

'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.

— Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Existential things are just relatable to everybody.

— Ti West

“It may well be that, when Christianity passes away from a culture, nihilism is the inevitable consequence, precisely because of what Christianity…

— David Bentley Hart

“More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish?”

— Sherwood Anderson

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

— David Ives

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

— Rollo May

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could…

— Albert Camus

“Anxiety, trauma and crisis are necessary catalysts to stimulate self-consciousness.”

— Rollo Tomassi

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is…

— Jerry Saltz

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of…

— Alfred Dreyfus

“There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“Obviously simplicity isn’t an unalloyed good — existentialism might be more like jumbling everything together into boxes and sorting it out when…

— Adam Kotsko

The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope,…

— Anonymous

“What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he…

— Christopher Morley

“Subconsciously, we all want to be nebula... In the end, we’re all connected. We’re all going to become one cloud of light…

— Jason Daniel Chaplin

“Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you…

— Paul Auster

“I like flaws and I feel more comfortable around those who have them.. The perfect people make me nervous. I don't trust…

— Lokesh Tuli

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth……

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and…

— Albert Camus

“The choice today is revolt. Igor Stravinsky wrote, “The old original sin was one of knowledge, the new original sin is one…

— Robert R. Reilly

Don't tell me about heaven. What about in this life, that there is a better way, that this is not in vain,…

— Jeremiah Wright

“One of my constant preoccupations is trying to understand how it is that other people exist, how it is that there are…

— Fernando Pessoa

“But then one voice arose from the babbling clamor to silence them all. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in a…

— Casey Fisher

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration…

— Jack Gilbert

“Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency,…

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr