Jean-Paul Sartre

Suffering is the origin of consciousness,” Dostoevski wrote

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche,

who, although they lived a generation apart, worked and wrote independently. They arrived at positions that were in many respects entirely contrary, for Kierkegaard was deeply committed to the idea of the Christian God while Nietzsche was just as deeply divorced from it; but in other respects they were alike

They shared the same experience of loneliness, anguish, and doubt, and the same profound concern for the fate of the individual person. These were the driving forces too in the work of the third great originator, the novelist Dostoevski, from whose writings, especially The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground, springs virtually the whole flowering of Existentialist sensibility in literature.

Kafka, Unamuno, Lawrence, Malraux, Hesse, Camus, and Faulkner

Long before Freud, Kierkegaard was aware of the hidden forces within the self, forces that, simply by existing, destroyed all rational, positivistic, and optimistic delusions

Dickens, Balzac, and Pushkin

Graham Greene, Andre Malraux, and Arthur Koestler

like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters.

is the feeling of being confronted by a bare existence.