Meaning — Philosophical Quotes
Camus thought the honest move was to admit there might not be any, and then carry on as if that didn't matter. Nietzsche said we have to make our own. Dostoevsky threw his characters into suffering and watched them claw meaning out of it. Kierkegaard thought you had to leap. The search itself may be the point. Every thinker here wrestles with the same silence, and each one responds differently. That variety is the collection's best argument.
73 quotes from 21 voices: Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Paulo Freire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frantz Fanon, Virginia Woolf, Søren Kierkegaard, Audre Lorde, Rabindranath Tagore, Günter Grass, George Orwell, Václav Havel, Rollo May.
- “Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness c...” — Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
- “The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Ev...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Ju...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little conn...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One m...” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- “I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I...” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “People never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as ano...” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
- “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invinci...” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- “The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave th...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
- “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?” — Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be?
- “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the ver...” — Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
- “To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world ...” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort o...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
- “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- “There are no facts, only interpretations.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks
- “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” — Franz Kafka, Letters to Oskar Pollak
- “There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it can...” — Franz Kafka, The Zuerau Aphorisms
- “Existence precedes essence. Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surg...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
- “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness ...” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
- “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the port...” — James Joyce, Ulysses
- “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
- “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible ...” — James Joyce, Stephen Hero
- “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other ...” — Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
- “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty ov...” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- “Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject ...” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if t...” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
- “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” — James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
- “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep ...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
- “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to ...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters
- “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the close...” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
- “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
- “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
- “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
- “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
- “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Journals
- “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know...” — Søren Kierkegaard, Journals
- “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, fo...” — Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic
- “Let my love, like sunlight, surround you and yet give you illumined freedom.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is ...” — Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
- “I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I...” — Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
- “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
- “Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.” — Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
- “Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.” — Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse
- “Writing — I can say this after years of practice — is a lonely business.” — Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion
- “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and ...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “There are more things to admire in men than to despise.” — Albert Camus, The Plague
- “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your lonelies...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
- “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothin...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
- “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is ...” — George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi
- “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certain...” — Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
- “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meanin...” — Václav Havel, Letters to Olga
- “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
- “I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. Fo...” — Albert Camus, The Plague
- “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
- “The soul is healed by being with children.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
- “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
- “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” — Rollo May, Love and Will
- “Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity re...” — Rollo May, The Courage to Create
- “The human dilemma is that which arises out of a man's capacity to experience ...” — Rollo May, The Courage to Create
- “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to ...” — Rollo May, Love and Will
- “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
- “I know of only one duty, and that is to love.” — Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
- “Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing th...” — Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit-Gathering
- “The soul is healed by being with children.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
- “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of t...” — James Baldwin, The Paris Review Interviews