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Existentialism Quotes

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Existentialism Quotes

“Reality presents itself always in the form of a specific concrete situation, and since each life situation is unique, it follows that also the meaning of a situation must be unique. Therefore it would not even be possible for meanings to be transmitted through traditions. Only values– which might be defined as universal meanings— can be affected by the decay of traditions… to put it succinctly: the values are dead–long live the meanings.”

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Book:The Unheard Cry for Meaning
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“We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual.”

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Author:Viktor Frankl
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“Buddhas, Christs and Mevlanas don't live in caves, they walk amongst you. You know why? Because we cannot change the world from the sidelines. You may play the make believe of nonattachment all you want - and it may bring you personal comfort for the time being, but it doesn't alleviate human suffering from the world one bit. The enlightenment bit is a small part of the equation. How you live afterwards determines the true worth of that enlightenment. If your idea of enlightenment revolves around some prehistoric routine of sitting and chanting, or crouching and praying, then such enlightenment is no enlightenment, but derangement.”

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Book:Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One
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“My consultants recommended several nihilists and existentialists but I rejected them all. A black turtleneck sweater does not a misanthrope make. Nihilists and existentialists tend to be bohemians, who invariably run in packs; despite their alienated stance, they have always struck me as a sociable lot who surround themselves with people because they are forever saying "Nothing matters," and they need someone to say it to.”

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Author:Florence King
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“The Nondual Nutcase (Sonnet Beyond Binary) Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought, whether it's separation between the mortal and divine, or the separation between reason and theology, or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry. Every single aspect of human consciousness touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness, which is why I never felt at home with euroschools, despite the fact that I too like everyone on the planet grew up in a westwashed education system. However, it took me over a hundred books and 2000 sonnets to wake up to the tangible realization, that the entire eurocentric paradigm is separatist, from its science to philosophy to theology to poetry. In euro schools of thought we say: keep the divine separate from the people, keep science separate from philosophy. In Naskarian we say: integration is divine by reason of poetry.”

PhilosophyTheologyOnenessExistentialismSufismNondualityAdvaitaNondual PhilosophyEurocentrismSeparatism
Book:Sonnets From The Mountaintop
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“Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought, whether it's separation between the mortal and divine, or the separation between reason and theology, or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry. Every single aspect of human consciousness touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness.”

ConsciousnessExistentialismScience Vs ReligionEurocentrismSeparatismEurocentricEurocentric EducationDivisionism
Book:Sonnets From The Mountaintop
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“Knowhere by Stewart Stafford Poleaxed by vampiric tapping— rattling timeline of a loop lapping— Hypochondriac paranoid toothache, tasting everything I see and break. Showed my tongue to an undertaker; licked his face — proved I’m no faker. A measured, grim diagnosis followed, matter from a cardiac pump hollowed. Draped loosely in a tea towel shroud, resurrected—naked, loud, and proud— Rocket to the pub for a post-wake baptism, a ploughman’s lunch with relish schism. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

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Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The Risk Assessor's Audit by Stewart Stafford An actuary at the butcher’s table, Serpentine watch-chain, strung as a noose, Each second, costed with surgical élan, Logging the theft in Babel columns loose. The paper catacomb lies crumpled, Its tenant, a doorway hobo in arrears, The knowing leaseholder's smile worn, Who'd changed the locks on all the years. The mutilated currency of memories, Clipped coinage set for melted dooms, Dried blood trickles in the hourglass, Turnkey guardian of vast, derelict rooms. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

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Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of undone things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing. He dived within, becoming part of it, surrendering completely to it to accept it into him and dissolve himself within it. He was a flake within the fall, an insect sucked up into the whirlwind, a bacterium caught within a water droplet forced whirling within the hurricane's howl. He was a particle of dust from the plain thrown up by the hoof of one horse within the charging line, a grain of sand upon the storm-besieged beach, a fleck of ash from the eruption's endless detonations, a mote of soot from the continent afire, a molecule within the encroaching dust, an atom from the star's heart thrown out in its last, majestic, exhaustive blast. Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality. He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction. Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity. Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals. He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together. He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova's radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.”

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Book:Feersum Endjinn
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“Algo sí he aprendido, Qué, Que nuestro dios, el creador del cielo y de la tierra, está rematadamente loco, Cómo te atreves a decir que el señor dios está loco, Porque sólo un loco sin conciencia de sus actos admitiría ser el culpable directo de la muerte de cientos de miles de personas y se comportaría luego como si nada hubiese sucedido, salvo que, y pudiera ser, no se tratara de locura, la involuntaria, la auténtica, sino de pura y simple maldad, Dios nunca podría ser malo, o no sería dios, para malo ya tenemos al demonio, No puede ser bueno un dios que da a un padre la orden de que mate y después queme en una hoguera a su propio hijo simplemente para poner a prueba su fe, eso no se le ocurriría ni al más maligno de los demonios.”

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Book:Caim
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“You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated." Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature." Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that somehow takes account of us. I don't believe that modern man is a stranded fragment of life in an empty universe. I've an instinct that tells me that there's a purpose, and that I can understand that purpose more deeply by trusting my instinct. I can't believe the world is meaningless. I don't expect life to explode in my face at any moment. When I walk back to my cottage, I don't feel like a meaningless fragment of life walking over a lot of dead hills. I feel a part of the landscape, as if it's somehow aware of me, and friendly.”

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Book:The Glass Cage
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“Rise I Will (The Sonnet) Every time there is darkness most foul, I will burn to bring light, sight and might. Every time there is misery unbound, I will churn my soul to outpour delight. Every time the horizon turns gloomy, I will rush to the aid as a sentient soldier. Every time the world is infected, I will walk the alleys as a living sanitizer. Every time there is savagery on the rise, I will be the beacon of human alliance. Every time bigotry overpowers the minds, I'll be the call to resuscitate fallen conscience. I am not a person but a sentience beyond time. Rise I will always in crisis to fortify my humankind.”

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Book:When Call The People: My World My Responsibility
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“Many people have asked me, where was I born. The answer to this question is not as straight-forward as you may assume. My body was born in a little suburban town on the outskirts of Calcutta, India. But the idea which you know as Naskar had its birth in not one but many places, and that too across the dimension of time. The first foundation stone of that idea was born on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River in India - then one part was born in Chicago - one in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia - one in Cappadocia, Turkey - and one in Pernik, Bulgaria – in that precise order.”

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Book:When Call The People: My World My Responsibility
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“He thought about the loss of humanity that was eating away at the world and the loss of the connection to the self that ate away at the consciousness which animated all into being. He thought about how the collective psyche was teetering on that knife’s edge between a desperation to live and a desperation to die. And here he was at the cusp of it himself.”

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Book:The Subtle Cause
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“Selam-e-Sapiens (Shattered Seer Sonnet) Sometimes I'm battered vagabond, Sometimes I'm shattered seer. No claim to name, fame or reign, Lovedrunk I write borracha poesía. Sometimes I'm mest-i-mevlana, Sometimes I'm my own Shams. Sometimes I'm dastan-e-dervish, Sometimes I'm selam-e-sapiens. I am no brahmin, I am the Godfather of brahmins; I am Parabrahma, the Brahmins worship. I am Adi, I am Anth, I am Ananth Adishakti. Leave your creed, crown and constitution, when you enter my door. I am but a human if you are human, if you're sectarian, I'm messiah galore.”

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Book:Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One
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“What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.”

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Book:Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
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“The powerful questions of life produce a dynamic dualism, which interplay creates the operatic structure that we must operate. Can the flesh and spirit coexist? Can inner despair and renewed optimism reside under the same roof? Can we harness humankind’s wretchedness in order to broker its salvation? Should all people seek out perfection or work to accept their fallibility? Should I eschew pain or embrace suffering? Do I cave into the meaningless of my life or actively rebel against the patent absurdity of human existence?”

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Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned to us; it is the certitude of the universal against the precariousness of the individual. When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect.”

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Book:The Art of the Novel
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