Existentialism Quotes - Page 7

• I want my name to mean me.

  Mark Haddon

  Mean, Names, Want

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• Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

  Rollo May

  Choices, Fundamentals, Individual

  Rollo May (1994). “Existence”, p.45, Jason Aronson

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• There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

  Albert Camus

  Integrity, People, Needs

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.66, Vintage

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

  Rollo May

  Stronger, Culture, Definitions

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

  Bill Watterson

  Laughing, Comic Strips, Make Sense

  "The Days Are Just Packed". Book by Bill Watterson, October 1993.

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• 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.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Strong, Opposites

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• Some men become what they were born for.

  Sheenagh Pugh

  Men, Born

  "Selected Poems". Book by Sheenagh Pugh, 1990.

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• It is a confession that we do not have such a prodigious head as is required to answer the question what is happening, that we cannot get on top of what is happening, that we are stuck in the middle of it, in medias res, inter-esse, amazing and bewildered. We cannot soar over what is happening with philosophy's eagle-wings. What's happening has clipped our wings.

  John D. Caputo

  Philosophy, Eagles, Wings

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• I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Jobs, Passion, Thinking

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2013). “Nausea”, p.128, New Directions Publishing

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

  David Ives

  Play, Love Relationship, Intense

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

  Albert Camus

  "Caligula and Cross purpose".

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• Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness.'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

  Ray Romano

  Attitude, Oysters, Identity

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Albert Camus

  Thinking, Years, Guilt

  Albert Camus (1965). “Caligula and Cross purpose”

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• Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.

  Sherman Alexie

  Morning, Men, White

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• 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.

  Annie Dillard

  Wings, May, Bucks

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• John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'

  Jack Kerouac

  Thinking, Trying, Generations

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA

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• I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Soul, Desire, Sin

  "The Devil and the Good Lord". Book by Jean-Paul Sartre, act 10, sc. 2, 1951.

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• 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

  Paul Tillich

  Men, Humanity, Essentials

  Paul Tillich (2013). “Systematic Theology”, p.32, University of Chicago Press

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

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sad, Men, Despair

  Walden ch. 1 (1854)

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• A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

  Andrew Sean Greer

  Heart, Night, Imagination

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• I rebel; therefore I exist.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Rebel

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• 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.

  Rollo May

  Art, Healing, Games

  Rollo May (1985). “My Quest for Beauty”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• 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.

  Philip K. Dick

  Alive, Want, Planets

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.158, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fashion, Government, Fake

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

  Paul Tillich

  Thinking, Faithful, Doubt

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