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Existentialism Quotes

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Existentialism Quotes

“I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit. But there is timing and judgment. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful.”

RealityReligionCultureMagicJudgmentIllusionTherapyExistentialismTimingWorldviews
Book:Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
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“Cup of Coffee (The Sonnet) A cup is just crockery till there is coffee in it. A head is just a skull till there's a mind in it. Clothes are just fabric till there's a character in 'em. Shoes are just footwear till there's a journey in 'em. Chest is just a bunch of bones till there's a heart in it. A body is just a bag of flesh till there's a being in it.”

Life LessonsMeaning Of LifeExistentialismGood LifeLife PurposeInner BeautyMindfulCharacter BuildingFree Thinking
Book:World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets
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“What we think of as acts of cruelty are in reality nothing of the kind. Someone from the Middle Ages would still find the whole style of our present-day life abhorrent, but cruel, horrifying and barbaric in a quite different way. Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilisation. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood.”

SufferingLiteratureExistentialismNietzscheSteppenwolfHermann Hesse
Book:Steppenwolf
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“For some reason, there is this façade that life should be full of happiness and without its suffering. Which, actually makes us suffer even more. Because when we get sad or something bad happens, we do not only feel bad about the thing itself but we also feel bad because our life is not the way it is supposed to be. Not realizing suffering and sadness is just a part of life and they are inevitable.”

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Book:Modern Human's Handbook
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“Resistance is dauntless audacity of the lesser against the greater through a will to suffering—the essential quality of existing—because suffering most clearly evinces the will-power of the sufferer. History is the story of ‘I’ as observed and evaluated by ‘me.’ When the history is written by my hands, I will fear nothing and live as if I am the history.”

InspirationSufferingExistenceResistanceMeaning Of LifeExistentialismIndividualismBeingWill Power
Book:On Resistism
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“They retained only the faintest recollection of what they had lost and had no desire to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They derided the mere possibility of this former felicity of theirs and termed it a day-dream. They could not even picture it to themselves in images and forms, but strange and wondrous to relate, having lost any credence in their former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so longed to be innocent and happy once more, all over again that, childlike, they fell down before this, their heart's desire, deified it, built temples, and began to worship their own idea, their own 'desire', and tearfully bowed before it in adoration, while at the same time utterly discounting its feasibility or the possibility of its realization. However, had it ever become possible for them to return to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone could have shown it to them again and asked if they wanted to return to it, they would certainly have refused.”

SufferingExistentialismDelusionPessimismNihilism
Book:The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
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“I know that the fact that I am always searching for God, always struggling to discover the fullness of Love, always yearning for the complete truth, tells me that I have already been given a taste of God, of Love and of Truth. I can only look for something that I have, to some degree, already found. How can I search for beauty and truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart? It seems that all of us human beings have deep inner memories of the paradise that we have lost.”

TruthChristianFaithBeautyCatholicExistentialismYearningSpiritual JourneyParadise LostSearching For God
Book:Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
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“Sonnet 1152 In Korea, I am Ingan - In Turkiye, I am Insan. In Latam, Soy Humano - In North America, I'm Human. In hindi, I am Khichdi*, A *hodge-podge of cultures, Few have the mind to stomach, while tribals feel perturbed. Life is love, love is life - all other existence is null and void. World is love, love is the world - all other paradigm is poison voyage.”

DiversityHumanitarianExistentialismInclusionAdvaitaMulticulturalismCultural IntegrationMulticultural PoetCultural StudiesWorld Cultures
Book:Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat
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“Everything about my experience was new and intense, but the new, intense things were somewhere far away. Or, rather, I felt as though a thick partition had formed between last night and today, marking a sharp distinction between the two. If the mere appearance and disappearance of the sun is going to disrupt the continuity of my heart this way, then I become strangely unsure of who I am myself. Life is like a dream.”

HeartSelfDreamPersonalityExistentialismNight And Day
Book:The Miner
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“I am poor—you are my riches; dark—you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own anything? After all, it is a contradiction that he can own something who does not own himself. I am happy as a child who is neither able to own anything nor allowed to. I own nothing, for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours.” —Johannes De Silentio, from_Either/Or_”

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Author:Søren Kierkegaard
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“Now, if you explore what you mean when you say you 'love yourself,' you will make the startling discovery that everything that you love is something that you thought was other than yourself, even if it be very ordinary things such ice cream or booze. In the conventional sense, booze is not you. Nor is ice cream. It comes 'you,' in a manner of speaking, when you consume it, but then you don't 'have it' any more, so you look around for more in order to love it once again. But so long as you love it, it's never you. When you love people, however selfishly you love them [...], still, it is somebody else that you love. And as you inquire into this and follow honestly your own selfishness, many interesting transformations begin to occur in you. One of the most interesting of these transformations is being directly and honestly 'selfish.' You stop deceiving people.”

LoveSelfExistentialism
Author:Alan Watts
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“Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.”

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Author:Søren Kierkegaard
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“Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in lyrics. “I don’t know who I am,” he says simply; at times he wishes he were no one. He’s a stickman shooting blanks at emptiness, living with “one dimension dead.” He’s an invisible man with a see-through mind. He’s a junkyard full of false starts. He’s a ghost-writer, feeling hollow.”

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Book:Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith
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“Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain — shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom?”

SelfExistentialism
Author:Nanamoli Thera
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“The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.”

SelfIndividualLonelinessEgoShadowBetrayalPsychologicalExistentialismJapanModernismDelayed GratificationMeiji
Book:Kokoro
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“Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep-bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours’ sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across the thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.”

EmpathyExistentialismAlbert CamusThe Plague
Book:The Plague
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“In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had peeped into one of my strange windows out of curiosity and had caught a glimpse of my doomed loneliness, or her fancy had been intrigued by the mute language, the clue of my painting. And then, while I advanced always along my corridor, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of those people who live outside, that strange, absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety and frivolity. And it happened at times that when I walked by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and longing (why was she waiting for me? why silent and longing?); but other times she did not get there on time, or she forgot about this poor creature hemmed in, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, could see her in the distance, smiling or dancing carefree, or, what was worse, I could not see her at all and I imagined her in inaccessible or vile places. And then I felt my destiny a far lonelier one than I had imagined.”

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Book:El Túnel
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“Wandering" What’s the point of wandering? to find a better place? a home? The loneliness will always capture me in its claws of no tomorrow”

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Book:Behind the Ghost Metropolis: Contemporary Poetry on Mental Health, Resilience, and Finding Hope
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“The Storm Stranger by Stewart Stafford Were I to shed forty coats, Or forty layers of this skin, I'd stay an intruder in myself, At a crossroads in a storm. Stranger in my own country, Pariah to everything beloved, Organ rejection by my own body, A lantern wanderer in limbo. All foul, cast out by my lamp, Saving those mistreating me, Traversing sanity's outer rings, I turn my collar up and trudge on. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

LonelinessMental HealthExistentialismAlienationSelf ConsciousnessWandererIdentity CrisisLimboEternal WanderingsJack O Lantern
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. By setting aside dependent emotions and constraining compromises, we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.”

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Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Ultimately, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition, and, unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before it resurfaces, often with a vengeance. On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional and religious structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.”

ReligionLonelinessSolitudeMythMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)”

LoveLifeLonelinessNostalgiaExistentialismSelf Knowledge
Book:A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
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