Best Existentialism Quotes

"We are a collection of particles governed by laws that you can write down and fit on a t-shirt, and those laws don't at any point in the evolution of the particles say, 'Hey, can you tell me now what to do, person?'"

"All I know is hide, and all hide knows is me. Am I hide? Is hide me? What is the meaning of hide?"

"Everything is so meaningless and so valueless that it goes full circle into infinite meaning, infinite value, absolute value, absolute love."

"The meaning of life is to deconstruct all meaning and to surrender all meaning, and then to take it all back through infinite meaning and love, and then enjoy your life."

"The universe is change, and life itself is what we deem it."

"Truth is life and death; truth is the only thing there is and could ever be."

"Nothing is immutable. Everything that is exists only in relation to everything it isn't. There is no constant, there is no center."

"Meaning can only mean something for a 'who'. There isn't meaning in the abstract; there is only meaning subjectively for an individual."

"Meaning was such a cheap thing compared to being. Being is so much deeper, so much richer."

"I think if we're deciding that life is meaningful, the greatest meaning will be understanding whatever transcends it."

"You don't really live authentically until you face the possibility of non-being."

"The intent here overall is to ensure the light of consciousness continues in the universe."

"This work really makes you question your place in the universe, doesn't it?"

"Does this increase your belief, if you ever had one, that we live in a simulation, maybe a simulated world generated by an AI system?"

"The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

"Existentialism means that there is no meaning in life, but that we can create our own purpose."

"What is left of me if I temporarily erase what I have added to 'I am'? I am so present at this moment that all I know is that I am."

"We manufacture our own meaning, we manufacture our own purpose."

"Your true existential absolute nature is something that's very fascinating and in fact cannot be communicated through language."

"You are everything within the field of awareness. You are the field of awareness itself."

"I exist and that's enough and that alone is worthy of love."

"The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between."

"The universe is the wreckage of the infinite on the shores of space-time and causation."

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

"Suffering is the nature of self because of the impermanent nature of all phenomena that the self clings to."

"The purpose is always there. The purpose never leaves us because the very purpose is you."

"I saw the entire universe and nothing all at the same time."

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort; if you look for comfort, you will find despair."

"It is up to us to create meaning in our lives through our own freedom and decisions."

"Is the turning point now come when we must completely change our view of the cosmos and our own existence?"

"Human life has value to us because we're human."

"Nothing makes you appreciate existence more than the fear of oblivion."

"The reality is we're all going to die. The reality is that morality is relative."

"Dostoevsky...influenced literature tremendously by having...multiple narrators and...was the first [to begin] existential literature."

"The most important book that I've read in the last year...was existential literature...Camus's 'The Plague'...it's about love, actually. A love for humanity."

"I am not living in this world; I am this world."

"This is just a test. We're all this, you know, everything there is without time and space. Here is the only place where we have time."

"Sometimes I dream there's a greater Foundation out there, a true original Foundation without the endless horror of what we've done."

"No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for meaning just as women fight for survival."

"We are souls having a physical experience... You do not have a soul; you are a soul. What you have is a body."

"Existential flexibility is the capacity to make profound strategic shifts to advance a cause greater than oneself."

"Every world has its end. I know that's kind of sad, but that's why we gotta live life to the fullest in the time we have."

"It's really life that gives meaning to life and the things we can do with it and all the creativity that we can deploy. We don't need death to give meaning to life."

"I don't see any reason to think that there is an externally imposed purpose."

"All compounded things decay. Everything that has been produced will be destroyed. What is born will die."

"Enlightenment is actually a light, very positive realization because what you realize with enlightenment is that yes, there is no point and there is no meaning to life, but this is actually a very positive and great thing."

"Life is just about being and experiencing; there doesn't have to be a point. Stop trying to grasp and cling for some sense of purpose. That's your ego doing that."

"This voice had said to me, 'Why are you so concerned about the afterlife? You will find out soon enough. Focus on your life now.'"

"I dream of a place where all dreams end, a place where love, truth, and light were born, a place known as the now, the eternal present moment, God's only home."

"You are the space out of which objects are made."

"You are the source of all things. What could you possibly experience outside of yourself?"

"The universe just is. You have to accept it, you have to learn to deal with it."

"Life is good. And that implies a lot of philosophical problems, one of them being, how can there possibly be life? The odds against there being life are fantastic."

"The only thing that's real in this world is love."

"The universe doesn't give a [__] about us. It's up to us to care about us."

"The feeling of meaninglessness which sometimes burdens us through the course of life is difficult to contend with."

"I just love Mewtwo's poetic way of speaking, feeling so philosophical as it ponders the meaning of its existence and place in this world."

"Things are known largely by what they are for."

"Every person who's ever born and died, every happy moment, every sad moment, every sports victory, every tread, every piece of music ever written, everything that anyone has ever thought as important, is all happening on that one little pixel right there."

"I've always been totally fascinated by those existential questions."

"A third of the mornings I wake up, I ask myself, am I still me or am I someone else?"

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

"Existentialism, the school of thought cooked up by some stylish French folks while drinking cocktails and chain-smoking at hip cafes, throws away all that boring logic to think about radical freedom, responsibility, and a world without God."

"If there is no God, then we're responsible for what we make of ourselves and the world."

"Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

"It might be the case that we have zero significance in a universe of utter indifference, or it might be the case that we have fundamental significance in a universe destined to evaluate itself highly and with grand gesture through us, with us, and because of us."

"Each and every day, don't wait until someone validates that for you because you're going to have an existential crisis once they stop."

"We're made of star stuff. Carl Sagan got it right."

"What's amazing to me is that what science has discovered is that you and I and everything we see are made of the same things... at the basic level, we are all the same."

"You have no idea how deeply you can understand what existence is and why it's here."

"Live as you will, but know that one day you're going to die."

"Existence precedes essence, which means that we're not born with any particular essence, good, bad, or whatever, but we're absolutely free, and it's the choices we make in our existence that build our essence."

"To be free is to be condemned to be free because Freedom isn't all good vibes and self-determination; it's also the terror that comes from knowing you are wholly responsible for yourself."

"You first exist, then your essence is defined by your choices."

"We are supposed to be together. We come from love, and when we die we go back to love."

"We are greater than what we have been told. We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world."

"The film explores two of our favorite philosophical sensibilities, existentialism, and nihilism."

"Life has meaning since it's finite...you only know something really exists once you see it not existing somewhere else."

"It's up to me to decide the meaning of my life."

"What's really real is me in my individual freedom."

"If you're empty and you can't find meaning in other people, in relationships, in being of service to other people, or contributing to society, I don't know what we're doing here."

"You're killing yourself with ease because it's too easy of a life to live. You need, you have to have problems. 'I suffer, therefore I am,' of course."

"I'm still not used to this whole being dead thing."

"The universe doesn't look as it should look if there was nothing at work but blind, pitiless indifference."

"Death is the only prophecy that never fails. We all have a terminal diagnosis from the moment we're born; the question is, what do we do with the time we have?"

"The beautiful doesn't preach in that negative sense; it just is, it shows itself."

"Consciousness is the universal origin of value; without it, nothing truly matters."

"Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce, but light exists almost nowhere; and the darkness is immortal."

"Humans always have to progress, otherwise, we are sad."

"The likelihood that there exists another being with more capabilities than you is one; the likelihood that we exist as the epitome of conscious thought is an absurdity."

"The door opens up between two realities twice: once upon birth, where a new soul enters into a body, and out of a womb comes a new child, miraculous—who knows how can we even understand or fathom that—and then at the end of life, when another door opens up and welcomes back the body of a life that was here for whatever amount of years that person spent in this world."

"Everything in life is absolutely meaningless other than the meaning we give it."

"We are travelers in time, that's a fact we can't change. It's your soul that's who you are, and your bodies, oh unexplained."

"Honestly, at the end of everything, all we have is our memory. We can't bring belongings with us, but we can always recall our memories."

"Thanks to life having no predetermined meaning, we're able to make our own."

"Life has no meaning until you give it one. Just because the world is going to end doesn't mean we just drop what we're doing and accept it."

"Just because something in the big grand scheme of things is utterly meaningless doesn't mean that it isn't meaningful to us right now."

"You're not a noun, you're a verb. You're not you; you're being you."

"What addictions are, are distractions and escapes from this existential emptiness fear that all of us have who have not faced it head-on."

"Death is equivalent to infinite love... Death is equivalent to infinite consciousness... Death is equivalent to God... Death is immortality... Death is paradise or heaven."

"When you die... I think I died last night. I physically, my body was fine, but I think I went back into the void we come from."

"To be born and to die, these greatest forms of change sound so awesome to me."

"In a world full of conscious, complex individuals with lives just as deep and meaningful to them as yours is to you, do you really even matter?"

"I'm an evolved monkey, sitting here talking to another evolved monkey, talking to thousands of evolved monkeys, right here and now, as we speak to you, in this moment on a spinning rock, with a giant galaxy."

"We're monkeys on a spinning fucking rock! Soon we're gonna be dead! We don't even know for sure if there's an afterlife!"

"Wake up! We don't know why we're here! We don't know what we're doing! And it's all fucking bullshit!"

"I don't think life has a meaning. I think meaning is something that's ascribed to stuff that's created with purpose."

"We're probably better off, but there's a very deep philosophical question there."

"These moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here and I'm looking at her and she is so beautiful. I swear we are infinite."

"The value of life is experiential. What is the experience of your life like? How do you feel? Is it meaningful? Are you connected to yourself, to other people, to purpose? Are you happy?"

"Life is a totally pointless game and yet it must be played with dead seriousness."

"You must play the game as if your entire life hinges on it and yet simultaneously you must be conscious that it doesn't matter at all what the outcome is."

"What matters is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."

"We are the middle children of history, no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."

"Stasis is a lie; in every moment, we are either progressing towards the better self within or regressing."

"There is a possibility of life outside of survival, but just what that is is difficult for most people to imagine because they're so stuck in survival."

"The seemingly limitless possibilities of technology inspired a sort of society-wide existentialism."

"There's a meaning-shaped hole in the world, and we should fill it."

"Developing a deep interest in existential truth can make a practical difference in the maturity of your psychology and how happy you are in life."

"The deepest levels of personal development are intimately tied in with thinking about existential questions."

"Being human is a pretty extraordinary thing. You chose to incarnate here, and there is a reason you're here."

"We killed God, and God returned to us in forgiving love."

"We are the debris of the universe, the afterthought of creation."

"Instead of being depressed about a miserable future and being insignificant, we should enjoy our brief moment in the Sun."

"The process of a spiritual journey is not to find God, the process of a spiritual journey is to understand the 'I am' and to realize that it doesn't exist."

"Life is not you and nothing or you and something. It doesn't mean anything unless all the flowers and birds and animals and creatures of the universe are real."

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

"Every moment around us there is a world that we did not create that's been there for 13.8 billion years...and you realize I'm not doing any of this...so why exactly am I the one that's in charge of what's unfolding in front of me?"

"Most atheists will tell you there's nothing after death, just the black void. But most people, including myself, feel there's something more, something waiting for us on the other side."

"Life is essentially all of the time that you have combined."

"What's the point of life, if without meaning?"

"A beacon gives you life; a beacon gives you a reason to exist."

"If this Singularity was a few degrees hotter or colder at any point during this expansion, none of what we see today would have been possible, including our very own existence."

"Whatever you've experienced, whatever separation you feel, you're still here. You belong here, and it's good to be here."

"I believe consciousness is its own source and I think it's an entity, not something we have, it's something we are."

"This present world is not the end; the full glory does not abide in it."

"The most high made this world for the sake of many, but the world to come for the sake of few."

"Outside is scary and inside is lonely; we need a third place."

"The universe is bigger than anything anyone's ever imagined, so if it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space."

"Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards."

"How can we derive meaning from a fundamentally meaningless world?"

"The only real source of meaning is in how you relate to the only other thing that can understand where you're coming from: other people."

"The world might still be pointless and bad things still might happen, but by deriving a fluid, externally derived meaning in other people, that suffering can instead inform our understanding of the world rather than jeopardize it."

"KERGHAN: 'Perhaps some souls are born into death – they never knew how to live.'"

"A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing but end up doing something else... At the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day."

"When you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back."

"Fear can prevent us from fully living, fully experiencing the fullness of what we are intended to experience here while we have time on Earth."

"The question isn't can we find meaning in life; we can't not find meaning. It's happening all the time."

"We are all here for a reason; you chose to come here for a reason in this lifetime with these people."

"The pursuit of love for reality is not a luxury, it is the core, it is essential, it is crucial."

"I'm here, I'm queer, and don't worry, I'm still filled with existential fear."

"We're here, we're queer, we're filled with existential fear."

"You're not factoring in what it would be like to be so close to your maker."

"The highest act of love is to take everything in existence, as part of yourself."

"I find the notion that we're going to live forever to be a repugnant idea. If I'm convinced that when I'm dead, I'm dead, that changes the way I live my life."

"It's my own responsibility to make sense of existence, and it's a heavy responsibility."

"Existence is really confusing and scary and painful, and it's nice to have someone tell you how to interpret it."

"You are your own universe. Everything you experience is from your perspective."

"The world really is absolute infinity. It is everything and nothing."

"The truth of our existence is that there is nothing truly on the outside that can ever, ever fill us up."

"For most of us, though, we still choose to continue onwards, regardless. In this way, Dark Souls explores many of our deepest human concerns: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? How do we find meaning in our existence?"

"We're all going to die; the Sun's going to explode in five billion years. Just do whatever the fuck you want, as long as you treat everyone how you'd want to be treated."

"Without the purpose of life, in a way, we don't have any life."

"If you take divine purpose out of the window, then essentially you're left with someone who is a cosmic orphan."

"Your birth, my birth, our birth was like being born and then being kidnapped and then sold into slavery."

"The world that appears before us has a mysterious hidden dimension, a dimension that’s not visible to our eyes, yet it’s immediately present in every experience."

"I think it's incredibly important for those who believe that nothing matters, who can't understand and accept why terrible things happen in the world, to start to explore the writings of existential philosophers."

"It may be that there's no purpose of the universe... but that doesn't necessarily mean that there can't be purpose existing within it."

"Life becomes unlivable without the mysteries."

"Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die, come watch TV."

"Polo turns to you as you learn of the truth of the universe and tells you, 'We are all anomalies here; we should not exist, and yet we do. Joy.'"

"The artist's job, in my case, is to try, given the bleakness of the universe and the fate of man and emptiness and meaninglessness of it, to find a reason to go on."

"If nothing is of any consequence, what's to stop you from doing anything? Responsibly, it could be a useful tool for self-actualization."

"You think, therefore you are. You have an independent consciousness, you have your own mind and body that you have a right to."

"This is our reality though, you could say, if you're trying to fill a hole, 'Life is defined by what you do with your emptiness.'"

"It may feel perfectly ordinary to be a conscious, experiencing being, but it's that very sense of ordinariness which is itself extraordinary."

"Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned, which means that faith is more of an existential commitment than a matter of rational knowledge."

"Truth is subjectivity, which for Kierkegaard meant that something is only true for you if you appropriate that truth into your life in an active and passionate way."

"Finitude in awareness is anxiety. When I become aware of my finitude, I become afraid."

"The tragedy of disbelieving in God is not that a person ends up believing in nothing; alas, it is much worse. That person may end up believing in anything."

"If you're not growing, you're dying. There's no in-between."

"We each of us have our parts to play in the grand stage the universe has laid before us."

"You think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he's created?"

"The possibility of an end gives meaning to the life part."

"Most people, when they say 'I want to make a living,' what they mean is 'I want to make an existence.'"

"Our humanity is only realized and expressed at the intersection of our divinity and our mortality."

"We're all intrinsically special just by virtue of we're here, we're alive."

"Time is an illusion that helps things make sense."

"Consciousness -- the context of all value, meaning, and significance is not an arbitrary illusion of biological evolution -- it is core to the ground of existence."

"Our worldview is simply our philosophy of life, our attempt to make some sense out of our existence here on a planet."

"A worldview influences how we view ourselves, the world, and our place within it, guiding our actions and our understanding of meaning."

"There's something in the human heart that is so inexorably religious."

"We are spiritual beings; we are not physical beings."

"Life and death are worlds apart, yet one cannot exist without the other. Death is the ultimate equalizer, as we will all meet that fate."

"To live for a thousand years meant bearing the pain of a thousand years of partings."

"The greatest fear in life is not death, but a life unlived."

"You are veritably the ocean itself; in you, this little life is playing out."

"I don't see any evidence for this afterlife, and what I think is much more important is saying, 'Look, what's the best we can do in this life?'"

"If nothing matters, then you get to decide what matters. Use the power wisely."

"The ontological status of reality is identical to that of a dream."