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.
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.
I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.
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.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!
No one can take away my freedom to choose how I will react.
It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
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.
Once you label me you negate me.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?
The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.