Top 100 Existentialism Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Above all, don’t lie to yourself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

52. “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

— Bob Dylan

53. “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

54. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

— Franz Kafka

55. “I rebel; therefore I exist.”

— Albert Camus

56. “Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.”

— Albert Camus

57. “What is to give light must endure burning.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

58. “I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”

— Haruki Murakami

59. “If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

60. “Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.”

— Osho

61. “Life should be lived to the point of tears.”

— Albert Camus

62. “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

63. “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

64. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett

65. “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

66. “We make our own hell out of the people around us.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

67. “I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

68. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

— Franz Kafka

69. “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”

— Haruki Murakami

70. “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.”

— Albert Camus

71. “People fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.”

— Jim Morrison

72. “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

73. “I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”

— Richard P. Feynman

74. “Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses...”

— Marcus Aurelius

75. “No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

76. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

77. “You want to live-but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying-and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?”

— Seneca the Younger

78. “One must give value to one’s existence by behaving as if one’s very existence were a work of art.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

79. “You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”

— Samuel Beckett

80. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”

— Albert Camus

81. “If I must be faithful to someone or something, I first of all have to be faithful to myself.”

— Paulo Coelho

82. “Being is only Being for Dasein.”

— Martin Heidegger

83. “I hate victims who respect their executioners.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

84. “Once you label me you negate me.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

85. “Who am I? What will I be? Why am I here? Where am I going?”

— Konstantin Stanislavski

86. “The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

87. “For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.”

— Albert Camus

88. “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the Weather.”

— Bill Hicks

89. “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”

— Franz Kafka

90. “Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

91. “Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

92. “You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.”

— Eckhart Tolle

93. “But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”

— Albert Camus

94. “To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

95. “I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I couldn’t want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”

— Fernando Pessoa

96. “How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”

— Leonard Cohen

97. “Be that self which one truly is.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

98. “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

— Franz Kafka

99. “The trouble is, you think you have time.”

— Buddha

100. “I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.”

— Franz Kafka