William Barrett quotes:

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.

Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

In teaching the young you have to satisfy the schoolchild in yourself and enter the region where all meanings start. That is where, in any case, the philosopher has perpetually to start.

Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.

To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.

We exist within the question of God.

The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to... Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence.

Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.

The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?

From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.