Top 24 Existentialist Quotes & Sayings

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms.

To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.

I think it's true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are - free, makers of meaning, 'issues' for ourselves, and so on - is at the same time a recognition of how we should try to live.

Man never ceases to seek knowledge about the objects of his experiences, to understand their meaning for his existence and to react to them according to his understanding. Finally, out of the sum total of the meanings that he has deduced from his contacts with numerous single objects of his environment there grows a unified view of the world into which he finds himself "thrown" (to use an existentialist term again) and this view is of the third order.

I grew up watching a lot of Italian and French movies, so I want to have that '70s look, in my dream movie. I want that thing that's not so much happening now, that's existentialist.

Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.

[M]an is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.

Of course, [Albert Camus] wasn't an existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a man of combat. It wasn't for nothing that he directed the Resistance journal called Combat.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.

Albert Camus, a great humanist and existentialist voice, pointed out that to commit to a just cause with no hope of success is absurd. But then, he also noted that not committing to a just cause is equally absurd. But only one choice offers the possibility for dignity. And dignity matters. Dignity matters.

I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.

"To be is to do," says the existentialist. "One only becomes real (human) at the point of action."

Existentialist philosophy recognizes the existence of the individual as the real purpose of human life. The recognition is basically atheistic and it encourages the individual to free himself from the impositions of custom, governmental authority, economic pressures, and cultural inhibitions.

Hmm... at some point when I was making 'Postcards,' it struck me, what the underlying themes for the record would be. It would be about choices, fears and doubts, and it had an existentialist theme to it.

Alexander Trocchi was an existentialist. He was looking at an alienated artist in the post-war period. It's modern because it applies now as well.

There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian...and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point.

I'm a card-carrying existentialist.

It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.

Sometimes I wake up in awe that I'm alive. I can't get over that part, so I guess it makes me kind of like an existentialist.

I am a confectionery-based existentialist.

I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.