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Existentialism Quotes

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Existentialism Quotes

“While I was starting out I had no idea on how the world of writing and publishing worked. I had no mentor, no guide, no support of any kind whatsoever. I had to learn everything on my own, through trial and error. And the most important point here to note is that, at that point I was completely unaware of my own gift - I had no inkling. Naturally, in those early days I often borrowed ideas from other scientists and philosophers. However, quite unexpectedly, once my true voice and tone started to awaken, I slowly started cutting ties with all external authority, except, of course, for occasional requirements of specific empirical data. Heck, this self-made and self-sustained legend was so damn proud of his inexhaustible vastness, that he wouldn't even quote his own old works in new ones, let alone others! Every new work must be unapologetically new - or I'd rather not publish at all. That's what conscience does to you - it takes away the slightest inclination of compromise, and turns you into an incorruptible beacon of pure conviction.”

WritingCreativityGeniusExistentialismWriterNaskarismPoet ScientistAbhijit NaskarOriginal Thinking
Book:World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets
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“Across the globe I am often referred to as "the Indian neuroscientist" or "the Indian Author", despite the fact that my work is practically nonexistent in India, statistically speaking. Considering that, 90% of my book sales come from US, UK and Canada, the rest 10% from Europe, Mexico, South America and Australia, and zero from India - for transparency and context purposes I'll tell to you one more time - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Scientist - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Poet - Abhijit Naskar is an Earth Philosopher. However, it's never about the sales, it's about the love. I only mention the demographics to put things in perspective. For example, there are many countries where people cannot afford to buy my books, since they are expensively exported from US and Europe, and yet, I receive far more love from these countries than the land I was born in. Philippines and Pakistan to name a few. As a matter of fact, hate wise speaking, Philippines is the only country so far, where I have not faced any hate and bigotry - which only goes to prove that, state of a currency does not reflect the broadness of heart. That's why, a substantial portion of my work is available freely on the internet. The point is - I am no more Indian, than I am a Yank or Canadian or Mexican or Turk or Swede or Pinoy or British or Brazilian or Egyptian or Aussie. Passport is just a glorified bus pass - nothing more. So, I repeat - I am an Earth Scientist - remember that. Nationalization of Naskar is desecration of Naskar.”

HumanitarianExistentialismHumanistGlobal CitizenNaskareansNaskarismAbhijit NaskarNaskareanWriter On WritingNaskar Hate
Book:Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch
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“Life doesn’t begin with meaning, purpose or planning. It begins with sex, the most brilliantly executed con in evolutionary history. If reproduction required a logical argument, the human species would have ended in the Stone Age.”

PhilosophyExistentialismConsentAntinatalismAbolitionismMeaningoflifeAntiprocreationEthicsofbirthHumanconditionReproductiveethics
Book:LIFE: AN EXPOSÉ: Why Sentience Was a Terrible Idea
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“When a young sixteen-year old Nazi died crying, “Heil Hitler!” he was not guilty, and it was not he whom we hated but his masters. The desirable thing would be to re-educate this misled youth; it would be necessary to expose the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint.”

EthicsExistentialismBeauvoir
Book:The Ethics of Ambiguity
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“The border of a nationality does not exist ‘in-itself’ in the same way that, say, a mountain, a shell or the moon exists. The border of a nationality is a condition that exists, if it can be said to exist at all, in the mind of the one who passively accepts it as existing. It is a ready-cut cloth, a costume, a fabricated flag, which is used to cover our nothingness.”

ExistentialismNationalismNationalityNational IdentityBad FaithExistential Quotes
Book:Life As A Kite
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“It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.”

ReligionValuesFaithSexChristianityMoralityEthicsExistentialismFree WillFidelityChastityChristiansMormonism
Book:A Short Stay in Hell
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“You know why I write books? Because it is the one thing about the outcome of which I don't give a damn. I don't care if they gather dust, I don't care if they don't sell. In fact, among my hundred plus works, there are a few that have sold barely ten copies. Yet, am I bothered! Nope! I don't write to sell books, I write because my mind teeters on the edge of psychosis if I spend a single day without writing. Sure, the ultimate mission behind my legacy is the construction of a humane world, but if you get down to the actual morale of the moment - the only recompense I get out of it all, is the felicity of putting my fervor on paper - thus immortalizing them for eons to come. That's how this one life could produce such an impossibly inexhaustible amount of literature in the first place - because I dream my ideas, breathe my ideas, and live my ideas. Better a lesser read genius, than a misread genius. Or to put it plainer still - I am not a writer, I am an anomaly - for better or for worse, I am an anomaly.”

WritingGeniusExistentialismWriting ProcessWriting PhilosophyAutistic AuthorHumanistic PsychologyGenius ThinkersGenius PoetAutistic Scientist
Book:World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets
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“Today, Jesus would be canceled. Called crazy. Too emotional. A threat. A man speaking of love in a world addicted to hate? Intolerable. Barabbas, on the other hand? He’d be trending. Verified. Launching a course: ‘How to Win Without a Conscience.”

PhilosophyTruthFaithSpiritualityChristianityAwakeningExistentialismReligion And PoliticsSocial CriticismSociety And Culture
Book:Emotional Roller Coaster: Confessions of a soul reborn from the ashes
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“I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”

LifeDesireExistentialismDisgust
Book:War of the Foxes
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“Suddenly, far off at sea, I perceived a black speck on the steel-gray ocean. I turned at once and my heart began to beat wildly. When I forced myself to look, the black speck had disappeared. I was on the point of shouting, of stupidly calling for help, when I saw it again. It was one of those bits of refuse that ships leave behind them. Yet I had not been able to endure watching it; for I had thought at once of a drowning person. Then I realized, as calmly as you resign yourself to the idea the truth of which you have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short where lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here, too, by the way, aren't we on the water? On this flat, monotonous, interminable water whose limits are indistinguishable from those of the land? Is it credible that we shall ever reach Amsterdam? We shall never get out of this immense holy-water font. Listen. Don't you hear the cries of invisible gulls? If they are crying in our direction, to what are they calling us? But they are the same gulls that were crying, that were already calling over the Atlantic the day I realized definitively that I was not cured, that I was still cornered and that I had to make shift with it. Ended the glorious life, but ended also the frenzy and the convulsions. I had to submit and admit my guilt. I had to live in the little-ease.”

HealingRealizationExistentialismAha Moment
Book:The fall
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“Don't you understand? If that's the case, then - then everything is dicated by random chance! Somewhere, there's a universe where you - for whatever reason - you didn't come looking for me, and I - I slit my throat. And who's to say that this universe is somehow better than that one? How can we claim that we live in a moral universe, and that every other one is immoral?”

ExistentialismMultiverseAmorality
Book:Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous
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“Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs.”

Mental HealthExistentialismAnti Psychiatry
Book:Man's Search for Meaning
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“Deep furrows mark his wide forehead and raised eyebrows convey a mood of deep thoughtfulness. The drooping lips, covered by a thick mustache and a long beard, present to us the image of one of those men who, as Schopenhauer once remarked, carry engraved on their foreheads the word DISAPPOINTED, either because their lives did not tum out to be what they expected or because their struggle against the world proved to be futile. We suspect that the latter case applies to Antisthenes. The man who in a Herculean attempt to set the world aright transformed himself into a dog for the purpose of denouncing its idiocy and irrationality probably faced death under a burden of existential disappointment.”

ExistentialismCynicismAntisthenes
Book:Antisthenes of Athens: Setting the World Aright
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“They'll want to see my reactions to their abundance: polite restraint, concealed outrage, and a base, desirous hunger beneath. I must play this part with a veneer of new-millennial-money coolness; serving up savage witticisms alongside the hors d'œuvres. It's a fictionalization of who I am, but my engagement transforms the fiction into truth. My thoughts, my ideas - even my identity - can only exist as a response to the partygoers' words and actions. Articulated along the perimeter of their form. Reinforcing both their self-hood, and its centrality to mine. How else can they be certain of who they are, and what they aren't? Delineation requires a sharp, black outline.”

RacismExistentialismGenerational WealthMicroaggresions
Book:Assembly
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“It's a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”

ExistentialismAfrican Philosophy Quotes
Author:Toni Morrison
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“Sonnet 1103 Our ancestors are not the boss of us, Life must be dictated by living conscience. Dead people may have the right to make suggestions, But they do not have the right to issue mandates. Our ancestors belong in history books, Our descendants belong in comic books. Only we are alive to belong here and now, Don't waste that life, submissive to books. Too much involvement in the past cripples your present, The same is true with too much involvement in the future. If you are oblivious to the human condition of now and here, Ignorance and intellect will equally end up causing disaster. Use past and future as markers of direction, But never as authority on living tradition.”

TraditionConservativeTraditionalExistentialismFundamentalismStereotypesRational ThinkingFreethinkerHumanist PoetryTranshumanism
Book:Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
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“Vande Vasudhaivam Sonnet 68 Don't be fooled by my attire, You think of me a fool because I want you to think of me a fool. I am a behaviorist, and by behaving idiot I study who's true, who's a tool. I don't dress all ancient like a monk, yet monks come to hear the words I utter. I don't dress fancy like world leaders, yet world leaders look to me for answer. I don't wear the uniform of law, yet coppers study me to be better cops. I never got to put on a white coat, yet white coats study me to be better docs. I am the person beyond the paradigm, I am but a reflection of the best of humankind.”

Self RealizationExistentialismPolitical PhilosophyPursuit Of KnowledgeHumanist PoetryNeurologyBehaviorismAutodidactNeuroscientistSelf Taught Scientist
Book:Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
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“Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.”

LifeDeathPurposeTimeHistoryFameExistentialismStocism
Book:Meditations
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“The Architect’s Prologue: The Occupation of the Void by Stewart Stafford “Lost are the seekers of miracles. Only in the end, in the telling and re-telling of the tale, is the miracle seen — Life." I crave the blank space that once was nothing— a silent void, an impatient canvas, a domain unclaimed. The emptiness that sired every iota of art on earth, fashioned by those daring hands to cram with humour, fear, obsession, logic, love, or passion. The human animal’s cursed superpower — consciousness — Finitude’s simultaneous scalpel and wound, lock-picked instinct’s shackles, freed this chosen being, to the detached observance of its kind and the world. As the only creature gifted enough to ask “why,” it sought meaning and virgin-birthed the quadruplet firmaments of art, theology, politics, and philosophy— the golden ignition of the divine spark of creativity writ large. Feast upon the field of canary yellow rapeseed Translucent on a day of blinding sunlight. See how the colour transcends structure and lives, dances, and breathes— Nature unveils its primordial palette, inviting insects to pollinate and Man to dare to dream of creating torch-bearing vibrancy, shockingly intense, and timeless. If your written words become literal nails to crucify you with, Then you have done your job well. You provoked a reaction. Writing that moves not is a body without a soul— a comrade of the anonymous unknown soldiers of literature. Let untouched parchment be our stage, and the vacuum our rousing scene, Promethean agency as alchemy’s fire— not supplicant-sought from unseen forces, but struck from the living earth itself. When golden boughs spring from rotting trunks, mortal man resists their provenance; yet the evidence of his eyes is the blinding truth. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

PhilosophyInspirationPoetryNatureCreativityPowerCreationMetaphorExistentialismPromethean
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling, unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not find him if he were not in some sense of our being, and yet of our being but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never be a portion of our being." — W.B. Yeats”

PhilosophyInspirationCreativityCourageTransformationSelf RealizationExistentialismDreadInner ConflictDaimonic
Book:Love and will
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“I have been searching for decades for certainty. It has not been solely a matter of thinking, in the creative sense, but of thinking and then attempting to undermine and destroy those thoughts, followed by careful consideration and conservation of those that survive. It is identification of a path forward through a swampy passage, searching for stones to stand on safely below the murky surface. However, even though I regard the inevitability of suffering and its exaggeration by malevolence as unshakable truths, I believe even more deeply that people have the ability to transcend their suffering, psychologically, and practically, and to constrain their own malevolence, as well as the evils that characterise the social and the natural worlds.”

Self HelpExistentialismJordan PetersonBeyond Order12 Rules For LifeMaps Of Meaning
Book:Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life
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“To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.”

ExistentialismCormac MccarthyThe Road
Book:The Road
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“Someone asked me the other day, do I like to write prose better or poetry? To which I can only say - both are fundamental to my works. In fact, I started out with prose, as you might remember - and my most invigorating ideas came to this world in the form of prose. Along the way, I felt a craving for poetry, so quite on a whim I wrote the first sonnet. Suddenly an entire new horizon opened up to me. Eventually prose and poetry became equally potent carrier of my ideas - they became complimentary to each other - they became supplementary to each other. However, I do admit, as I grow older, I'm getting more and more drawn towards poetry as my primary vessel.”

PoetryProseExistentialismPoeticHumanitarian PoetryPoets And PoetryPoetic ProseProse PoetryHumanistic PsychologyHumanitarian Literature
Book:Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One
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