893 Quotes About Existentialism

It is a nerve-racking thing to be nothing, to be free, to be responsible for one’s own becoming at each and every moment. It is to be plunged into anxiety, into angst, to suffer the terror of one who stands at the edge of a lifelong precipice. There are no anchors now, no ropes, no gravity to keep us grounded; things fall apart in the stratosphere.

Those who are most afraid of their own freedom are the ones most desperate to take it from others.

These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don't get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd start stammering. It's true that for a long time now nobody has bothered how I spend my time. When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story : plausibility disappears at the same time as friends.

When I saw myself in front of the mirror without a mask, I feel like crying with forbidding melancholy and embarrassment, knowing what secrets, hurts, and longings lurk behind my soul.— Danny Castillones Sillada, The Confession of a Surrealist

Praise to be the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.

Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.