Best 156 quotes in «existential quotes» category

Few are the birds who fly pass through the human heart

Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.

For innocence lost The same is the cost The ride of your life But you can never get off

Freedom is an existential art.

Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

Glowing taper in hand, she could almost imagine she was a star. Isolated. Insignificant amid the multitudes. Yet every bit as afire with heat and heart. Strange, how contemplating the vastness made her feel a little less alone. From far enough away, on some other world, perhaps she would appear to be part of a constellation.

From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

I always thought I wasn't afraid to die. No... no one is afraid of death itself. Your pain and suffering is over in an instant. What really makes me suffer... Is seeing you crying over me... From the darkness of the Milky Way. I'm sorry... Please don't make that face. You look best shdn you're smiling, you know.

How do text messages make you feel existential? I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.

I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

If we are able to convey ‘meaning’ to things and to actions, we may dominate part of the obscure world of ignorance. When we try to give sense to our life, we can come to ‘awareness’ and fill some of the numerous black holes of witlessness in our thinking. We may, then, defy and dam the existential void, down the stretch. ("Not without my shadow")

I’d never ride a rocket into out space, so standing at the edge of the ocean was probably the closest I’d get to touching something boundless and greater than myself. For me, the ocean had a way of putting the rest of the world into context for a couple seconds.

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.

In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire--in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation--that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for life-in-itself clothes itself in the sex drive--belongs to the particularity of being human.

Imagine the universe is like this cloth.” Philippos said, lifting up an old rag off the ground. “There are thousands of tiny threads woven in tiny, little patterns. If you follow one thread it will lead you to the end, but also you’ll see that more threads are connected to it. What if you decide to follow another? Where would that lead you? And if you cut one thread, what would happen to the cloth then? Would it fray until it fell apart? Or would it just change pattern?” he paused thoughtfully. “Wielders like you can see those possibilities. You can follow the threads and see where they begin and end, where and how they connect with everything else and what might happen if something changes along the way.

If your mind is only engaged in the external reality, your life remains far from the existential truth of life.

In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another.

In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

I rather aspire to be a tree that endures the whirling tempest than ears of rice that lower their heads.

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.

It’s maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1965 and jumped to the section entitled “Junitaki Today.” Of course, the book’s “today” being 1970, it was hardly today’s “today.” Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a “today.” And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history.

the path your life is stuck on and be free It's a dark whisper calling to me. But I'm not brave enough to listen. I'm old enough to know I don't have any special talents. So no matter how depressing... I have to suck it up... And live the life I have.

I wonder the world desperate to find the edge of myself… But it seems that a human soul is always “to be continued”…

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?

Love is a sensible phenomenon, but not intelligible. You cannot know whether you love or not; you can only feel it in your heart and soul. Love as a knowable phenomenon is not an act of love itself, but a rational 'illusory' design of the intellect, an act of psychological adaptation to the environment. To support the existential meaning of your being in this environment, your intellect provides you with an artificial mental programming system.

Living forms are not in being, they are happening, they are the expression of a perpetual stream of matter and energy which passes through the organism and at the same time constitutes it.

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

Mais les enfants ne connaissent point ce bris de prison qu'on nomme le suicide

Love transports mortal beings to the existential plane of spiritual eternity transcending the emotional, mental, and physical limitations of an inaccurately perceived finite existence.

My Life had stood-- a Loaded Gun

Out of the decisions that we make in life, our Self emerges. What we choose in life is not the thing chosen out there, but oneself.

o There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

[...] nothing is ever only good and nothing is ever only bad. Everything is somewhere in the middle.

Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy.

She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.' 'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

Pedal the cycle of character, dismiss the people of sheep, savor the zealot they weep

Quand l'immanence surplombant sur nous, ciel, gouffre, vie, tombeau, éternité, apparaît patente, c'est alors que nous sentons tout inaccessible, tout défendu, tout muré. Quand l'infini s'ouvre, pas de fermeture plus formidable.

Some ideas are existential luxury.

So, here we are, all of us poor bewildered darlings, wandering adrift in a universe too big and too complex for us, clasping and ricochetting off other people too different and too perplexing for us, and seeking to satisfy myriad, shifting, vague needs and desires, both mean and exalted. And sometimes we mesh. Don't we? - Attributed to James Flynn, Ph.D.

Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not...it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier – here or there. The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home. But they wouldn't let him go home.

Sometimes when I think about entities—like in “separate entities”—it gets mighty grim. I start thinking, and I nearly go to pieces. …For instance, say you’re riding on the subway. And there are dozens of people in the car. Mere “passengers” you’d have to call them, as a rule. “Passengers” being conveyed from Aoyama 1-chome to Akasakamitsuke. Sometimes, though, it’ll strike you, that each and every one of those passengers is a distinct individual entity. Like, what does this one do? Or why on earth do you suppose that one’s riding the Ginza Line? Or whatever. By then it’s too late. You let it get to you and you’re a goner.

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.

Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king's grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist.