Existentialist Quotes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Friedrich Nietzsche

Jean-Paul Sartre

Albert Camus

Simone de Beauvoir

Søren Kierkegaard

Arthur Schopenhauer

It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.

My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Søren Kierkegaard

Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Jean-Paul Sartre

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou.

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me