People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

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.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you‘re not in that existential panic when you don’t have a novel at all.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.

Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics – religion, death, existentialism – to the screen. … But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.

I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

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.

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!

if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they’re intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

I think living in our culture right now, there’s a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that’s rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

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.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.

Death is a continuation of my life without me.

I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here‘ written all over it.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.

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

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Camus himself described this work as ‘an attempt to understand the time I live in’.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days… and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

I just look around and say, I’m a mess. I don’t know why I do things.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.

Struggle is what it means to be alive and free.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

Everything is true, and nothing is true!

The great thing about ‘The Office‘ and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it’s mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Walking through the city streets… Is it by mistake or design?

It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

My favorite word is existentialism. I can’t say it and I’m not quite sure what it means.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

It wasn’t about believing this or that, it wasn’t even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

The single biggest existential threat that’s out there, I think, is cyber.

Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

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.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws- laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit- given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

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

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There’s that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we’re doing sometimes, or why it matters. It’s our existential crisis.

I’m more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It’s not a retail experience. It’s an existential one.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism. There is no particular religious tradition in my work. There is only one psychological assertion that I would insist upon. That is: the SELF takes precedence.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

I found motherhood a crash course in existentialism (what is my purpose in life, am I mistress or slave of my destiny, when the hell do I get some sleep?) and [the book] ROOM was the result.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

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

All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don’t have a clue how hard it is going to be.

Modern Existentialism… is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Why does man create? Is it man’s purpose on earth to express himself, to bring form to thought, and to discover meaning in experience? Or is it just something to do when he’s bored?

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word ‘existentialism.’

The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism. It is part reality and part nightmare

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

Il n’y a de rГ©alitГ© que dans l’action. (There is no reality except in action.)

Existentialism is possible only in a world where God is dead or a luxury, and where Christianity is dead.

Nothingness haunts Being.

All human actions are equivalent… and all are on principle doomed to failure.

It wasn’t the New World that mattered… Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

The point is there ain’t no point.

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

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.

Apparently there is no profit in the unique, or not enough to make it worthwhile to preserve. Ultimately it drains the life out of us, and existentialism starts to make more and more sense.

I want my name to mean me.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

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.

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

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.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.