A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
The point is there ain't no point.
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
My favorite word is existentialism. I can't say it and I'm not quite sure what it means.
Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen. . . . But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity.
I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.
This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth. . . . Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
I just look around and say, I'm a mess. I don't know why I do things.
To assume that one's existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.
Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own
Some men become what they were born for.
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in. . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.
Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.