Existential Quotes

“You don't have to stay anywhere forever.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych

“All that is transitory is but a metaphor.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.”
― Franz Kafka, The Castle

“I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.”
― Jean-Paul Satre

“We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“I am a clown...and I collect moments.”
― Heinrich Böll, The Clown

“She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.'

'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes.”
― Phoebe Stone, The Romeo and Juliet Code

“Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“The universe is a meat grinder and we're just pork in designer shoes, keeping busy so we can pretend we're not all headed for the sausage factory. Maybe I've been hallucinating this whole time and there is no Heaven and Hell. Instead of having to choose between God and the devil, maybe our only real choice comes down to link or patty?”
― Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead

“I close my eyes
Only for a moment,
then the moment's gone
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes, a curiosity...

Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground,
though we refuse to see...

Now, don't hang on
Nothing lasts forever
but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money
won't another minute buy...

Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind."

(Kansas guitarist Kerry Livgren wrote this after reading a book of Native American poetry. The line that caught his attention was "For All We Are Is Dust In The Wind.")”
― Kansas

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”
― Javier Marias

“Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations

“I leaned back on my palms, looking at the Milky Way spilling in modest grandeur across the sky. A fountain of stars frothing over, surrounded by a mist of stardust. It looked like raw magic, like the glimmer I’d spy in a shadowy corner where the sun skimmed off invisible particles, reminding me there was a whole hidden world tucked inside this ordinary one. And it was up there every night, offering its mute beauty while we sat here with our heads down, tragically terrestrial.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.”
― Rob Ryser, Great Desires for Absent Things

“They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.”
― Antonio Porchia, Voices

“...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.' That's T.S. Eliot, in case you were wondering. An oldie but a goodie. When it came to existential exhaustion, the man was one smart cookie.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“A life with someone you can say good-bye to is a good life, especially when it hurts so much to say it to them.”
― Kafka Asagiri, BEAST-白の芥川、黒の敦- [BEAST - Shiro no Akutagawa, Kuro no Atsushi]

“At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.”
― Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy

“She had been in one of those sleeps so heavy they leave you feeling sad, disorientated, your stomach full of tears. A sleep so deep, so dark, that you see yourself dying, that you wake up soaked with cold sweat, paradoxically exhausted.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance.”
― Julie Powell, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

“God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“The way the function dictates the form... elegant lines... nothing extraneous... this shoe perfectly expresses the essence of shoeness.”
― David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp