Existential quotes:

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The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual. -- Friedrich Durrenmatt
I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it. -- Steven Wright
I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst. -- Meg Ryan
I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one. -- Thomas Lynch
I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through. -- Sean Lennon
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. -- R. D. Laing
Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works. -- Michael Leunig
A related recurring theme is the exploration of how we take for granted the things in our immediate environment that are common and ordinary. Existential blindness, of sorts. -- Vera Nazarian
The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence. -- Paul Tillich
Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty. -- Paul Tillich
Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. -- Archie Shepp
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. -- Viktor E. Frankl
No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. -- Simone de Beauvoir
The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber. -- Michael Mullen
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger. -- Dalai Lama
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. -- Charles Bukowski
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. -- Rose Tremain
Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth. -- Bo Burnham
Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened. -- Archie Shepp
Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher. -- Antonio Tabucchi
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage. -- Peggy Noonan
There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible. -- Paul Ricoeur
I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb. -- Sergey Brin
Around the world, climate change is an existential threat - but if we harness the opportunities inherent in addressing climate change, we can reap enormous economic benefits. -- Ban Ki-moon
The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level. -- Jerry Saltz
Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure. -- Rick Yancey
I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe. - Julia Louis -- Alfred Dreyfus
The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology. -- Jayne Ann Krentz
At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. -- Paulo Freire
Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units. -- Paul Di Filippo
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation. -- Norman Mailer
So when you're dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as 'we are all toast anyway,' then denial is a pretty good way of coping. -- Bob Inglis
I may look like an American WASPy doctor or lawyer, but I feel just like Woody Allen. Don't cast me for my looks - I have a very ironic, existential, crazy Jew in me. -- Spalding Gray
The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone. -- Bill Moyers
I never had an existential moment when I asked myself what I was going to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer, and I knew exactly the kind of lawyer I wanted to be. -- Alan Dershowitz
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be. -- Anne Lamott
Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll. -- Billy Corgan
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. -- Simone de Beauvoir
The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat. -- Preet Bharara
The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself. -- Sonia Sotomayor
Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds. -- James Howard Kunstler
The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself. -- Simone de Beauvoir
I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering. -- Yusef Komunyakaa
I was not popular in school, and I was definitely not a ladies' man. And I had a very painful adolescence, because it was all very strange to me. It wasn't like I got beat up, but the humiliation and isolation, and the existential 'God, I exist, and nobody cares' of being a teenager were extremely pronounced for me. -- Joss Whedon
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway. -- Anne Lamott
I'm a teleological, existential agnostic. -- Woody Allen
I am gripped by an existential panic. -- Bret Easton Ellis
Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame. -- Stephanie Zacharek
Life has existential suffering; we become happy by caring. -- Debasish Mridha
Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues? -- Tom T. Hall
To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair. -- Jason Silva
Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. -- Ray Brassier
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom. -- Roger Ebert
There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage. -- Barbara Ehrenreich
All gradients of reality, all existential distinctions, have finally been annihilated. -- Margaret Wertheim
I really like that homosexuality is a little bit of an existential puzzle. -- Guy Branum
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. -- Jonathan Franzen
Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great. -- Aaron Levie
People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom. -- Woody Allen
Did television execs have souls? Now, that was an existential question and a half. -- J.R. Ward
Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch. -- Chuck Klosterman
Of course, the surest way to free yourself from an existential crisis is through comedy. -- Jennifer Beals
People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting. -- Terence McKenna
Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel. -- Robert M. Gates
(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time) -- Kate Atkinson
Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. -- Marianne Williamson
I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff. -- Dana Carvey
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships. -- David Ives
Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation. -- Marc Riboud
I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing. -- Juliana Hatfield
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith -- Ernest Becker
The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis. -- Cornel West
Democrats and Republicans love Israel and all of us care about the existential threat to Israel from Iran. -- Jane Harman
I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk. -- Libba Bray
... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'. -- Lee Friedlander
I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes. -- Tao Lin
The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. -- John Lanchester
I always tell people that revelling in big ideas for me is kind of like an antidote to existential angst. -- Jason Silva
...the oppressor is truly repressed. Their poverty is existential, often surrounded by an abundance of material goods. (Leonardo Boff, p. 179) -- Mev Puleo
there's no forsaking what you love no existential leap as witnessed here in time and blood a thousand kisses deep -- Leonard Cohen
There's a real existential anxiety at having to exist not just in a generalised social framework, but a capitalist social framework. -- Autre Ne Veut
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence. -- Norman Mailer
Sometimes my poetry is an attempt to keep off existential terror; sometimes it is a grappling with philosophical problems; sometimes just fun. -- Gwen Harwood
A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. -- Viktor E. Frankl
Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair. -- Charlie Pierce
I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false. -- Albert Camus
Being on the spiritual path means you want to be a success in an existential sphere, not just on a social level. -- Jaggi Vasudev
I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life. -- John Lahr
I'm interested in existential films: I love movies that console you in the same way that a person consoles a weeping child. -- Louis Garrel
I can never be an atheist, because God is our celestial hope for our existential worries, our cosmic chance against absurdity!" MMI -- Mehmet Murat ildan
Im interested in existential films: I love movies that console you in the same way that a person consoles a weeping child. -- Louis Garrel
Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float. -- Harold Ramis
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability. -- Milan Kundera
We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die. -- Joko Beck
Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear -- E. F. Schumacher
Perception through emptiness is existential, as the transience of all phenomena affirms the indivisibility of existence itself, before, within and behind all manifestation. -- Georgi Y. Johnson
Start a 'Stop Doing' list. I'll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list -- James C. Collins
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. -- Karl Jaspers
I can't imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all. -- David Cronenberg
When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat. -- Richard Greenberg
My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife. -- David Cronenberg
The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside. -- Erich Fromm
The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance. -- Greg Sestero
ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It's a serious problem overseas, but it's confusing and frightening. -- Joe Biden
I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis. -- Kate Zambreno
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. -- Northrop Frye
My films require that the spectator ask the big existential questions. If you're not interested of turning inwards for answers, my films won't fulfill their whole purpose. -- Lisa Langseth
I consulted a therapist at Mass. General. After about 20 minutes, he stopped me and said, 'You're just a big existential garbage pail. Go home and relax.' -- Spalding Gray
All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic. -- Josh Radnor
One doesn't do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from. -- Irvin D. Yalom
I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe. -- Lily Tomlin
I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe. -- Julia Louis-Dreyfus
No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth. -- Andrea Dworkin
The caliphate will have been dismantled. It will still be a problem, but that has been our focus because that is the greatest existential threat to U.S. interests. -- Joe Biden
I reject the idea that there is some sort of existential "clash of civilizations." I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort. -- Bernard-Henri Levy

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