#existentialism

I felt like I was disappearing.

From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Belief is a choice, not a necessity.

From The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

The search for meaning is an endless journey.

From The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse

What would happen to the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared?

From The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The only way to deal with the future is to function in the present.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

We are not the sum of our experiences; we are the experiences themselves.

From The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

There is no such thing as a guilty man.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

I have not only a past, but a future, and I can see it as well as I can see the present.

From The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

We’re all just a bunch of cells, and it’s all going to end up in the ground.

From Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

The modern world requires us to construct our own meaning.

From Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

Rebellion is the way of the human being.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

The search for meaning is the essence of being human.

From God: A Human History by Reza Aslan

AI has the potential to reshape our understanding of what it means to be human.

From The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher

We must choose ourselves; once we have chosen we are responsible for ourselves.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape not just our economies but our societies and our very understanding of what it means to be human.

From The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

We are not the authors of our own destinies; we are merely players in a larger game.

From The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Life is a series of moments, a series of choices.

From The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The other is the condition of my freedom.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

From The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

From The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

The quest for meaning is a quintessentially human endeavor.

From The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

From The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

The unexamined life is not worth living.

From The Republic of Plato by Allan Bloom

Mystery is more important than certainty.

From The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse

There is no such thing as a purely rational act.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

You can’t see the past; you can’t see the future.

From The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.

From Dune by Frank Herbert

It’s a hard thing to go through life knowing that you’re going to die and not knowing how.

From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

From The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

We are all just trying to make our way in the world.

From The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen

There is no beautiful surface without a terrible depth.

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

We are all free, and we are all responsible.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Ambiguity is the fundamental quality of human existence.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

In the face of death, all men are equal.

From 1984 by George Orwell

In the end, we are all just stories.

From The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

Suffering is an inherent part of life.

From Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

From The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The search for God is ultimately a search for meaning.

From A History of God by Karen Armstrong

To be oneself, one must be free.

From The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

From The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.

From The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Man is a useless passion.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Religious traditions emerged not to offer answers but to provide frameworks for understanding our existence.

From The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong

The sacred is the source of all meaning.

From The Sacred and The Profane by Mircea Eliade

The search for God is the search for meaning.

From God: A Human History by Reza Aslan

It is good to live because living is all we have.

From The Stranger by Albert Camus

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

From The Stranger by Albert Camus

One must imagine Sisyphus as a happy man.

From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

We are condemned to be free.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Freedom is not only what we do, but also how we think.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

The past is always present, and the future is still to come.

From The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

True faith requires the courage to live without certainty.

From The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse

The ambiguous nature of man reveals itself in the fact that he is both the subject and the object of his own action.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even understand it myself.

From The Trial by Franz Kafka

The essence of freedom is to have choices.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

All life is problem solving.

From The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper

We are not human doings; we are human beings.

From Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

Fear of death is the greatest obstacle to living fully.

From The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Being-in-the-world is a fundamental characteristic of Dasein.

From Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

To be human is to be in search of meaning.

From The World's Religions by Huston Smith

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

To be human is to be in relation.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

From Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

The essence of life is to search for meaning.

From Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Hell is other people.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

In the pursuit of the divine, we find ourselves.

From A History of God by Karen Armstrong

We must choose ourselves, as we are the ones responsible for our own existence.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

The silence of the world without us would be deafening.

From The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The unexamined life is not worth living.

From The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained by DK

Without music, life would be a mistake.

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.

From Cosmos by Carl Sagan

To be happy, we must not be too happy.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

Freedom is not a given; it is something we must achieve.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Hell is other people.

From The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained by DK

One must choose oneself; one must create oneself.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

The ambiguity of being is the source of all our dilemmas.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Ambiguity is the foundation of human existence.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Rebellion is the struggle of being human.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

From The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

You can never find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.

From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The act of rebellion is the declaration of the individual.

From The Rebel by Albert Camus

We are condemned to be free.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

We are thrown into the world and must make sense of it.

From Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

We are all doomed. We are all doomed.

From The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

From Open by Andre Agassi

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

We are more concerned about our reputation with the dead than our reputation with the living.

From Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

From The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

We must choose ourselves.

From At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell