The philosophy of existentialism has made a profound impact upon the team here at Quotesome. It dates back to the first time Michelle read The Stranger by Albert Camus and began to explore existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. She had a lot of sleepless nights and would stay up until sunrise jotting down eye-opening quotes from her readings. The eventual flood of quotes she had gathered were what inspired the idea of Quotesome.
Through existentialism we learned to take full control of our lives. Through existentialism we learned that there is no formula for life– you can choose to live your life however you wish and it wont render your life any more or less valid than anybody else’s. Through existentialism we found the courage to ditch the lives that were expected of us (graduate from college and get a respectable job) to work on Quotesome. As a token of appreciation, we’ve put together a list of quotes about Existentialism. We encourage you to bookmark this page and refer to it whenever you feel like you are straying away from yourself, or simply to replenish yourself with vigor for life.
Not all the quotes deal with existentialism from an immediate philosophical standpoint. In fact, most of the quotes capture the “feeling” of existentialism that arise from the stages of an existential crisis. There is no point in trying to label existentialism as a “bleak” or “positive” philosophy– in the spirit of existentialism, it is up to the individual to decide whether they wish to persist in despair or emerge from it.
You are free and that is why you are lost.
Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time.
As if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
You are the music while the music lasts.
To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life’s neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there’s no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice that ensures that a loser’s luck will turn around. The universe doesn’t care one whit whether you’ve been winning or losing; each roll of the dice is just like every other.
I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
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