Existential Quotations

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.

I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear

I am gripped by an existential panic.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

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.

All gradients of reality, all existential distinctions, have finally been annihilated.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

Men who have not known the horror of death are not likely to be awed by it.

Though love is instinctive, it cannot develop without a certain stimulus and use.

I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.

I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.

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.

To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful...With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.

Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.

Start a 'Stop Doing' list. I'll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

I'm really enjoying growing up. I feel like so much of my life was in an existential crisis when I was young, and I don't feel as bogged down by that anymore.

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or sub oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradiction of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them to be men is to be oppressors

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

All the cliches are true about parenting. All I've ever wanted to do is be a father, but there's this existential mirror that's held up when you have a kid.

I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.

there's no forsaking what you love no existential leap as witnessed here in time and blood a thousand kisses deep

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.

...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours...

There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

[Jean-Paul ] Sartre was a throwback to the existential period. I'm not really so much into that these days. I went through a period of going over things and looking at them again to see what they were. But I'm into psychiatry type things. I'm into philosophy. I'm into that sort of thing.

Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom!

Zen is not “attained” by mirror-wiping mediation, but by “self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now.” We do not “come”, we “are.” Don't strive to become, but be.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.

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.

Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

Most people are other people.

It is precisely when you are loved a lot that you might realize a second loneliness which is not to be solved but lived. This second loneliness is an existential loneliness that belongs to the basis of our being. It's where we are unfulfilled because only God can fill us.

Because imaginary time behaves like another direction in space, histories in imaginary time can be closed surfaces, like the surface of the Earth, with no [existential] beginning or end.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.

Despair is suffering without meaning.

Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay.

I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.