Quotes on Existentialism

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?

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.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.

You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

Let us do something, while we have the chance! ... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

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.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.