Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
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.
One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.
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.
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 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.
All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.
When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
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.'
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
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.
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
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.
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.
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.
To assume that one's existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.
The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence.
Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.
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