Top Existentialism Quotes

What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once.

Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of t...

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. Thi...

HAMM:Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!CLOV (violently):That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any...

We have an infinite supply of information and yet we cannot read.

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few...

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the t...

HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn't know.HAMM:What? What didn't you know?NAGG:That it'd be you.(Pause.)

Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by whi...

Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.

HAMM:Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!CLOV (violently):

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if t...

You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people - which means there is no way out. Hap...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to...

The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite.

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...

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 ch...

you make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Ve...

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of...