Existential Philosophy Quotes

Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me - and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

All existence is a manifestation of God.

...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life - that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion - or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate... If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger] adopted the second alternative.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

We climb mountains because they are there, and worship God because He is not.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Life has no beginning, middle or end.

Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own.

The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.