Best 156 quotes in «existential quotes» category

Would any of you like to share your career aspirations within the class? Jim? I dunno, to be honest, I was just hoping to be able to keep the demons away...

Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situations, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura. For every existential crisis once again puts in question both the reality of the world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious," since on the archaic levels of culture being and the sacred are one. As we saw, it is the experience of the sacred that founds the world, and even the most elementary religion is, above all, an ontology. In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution not only because it can be indefinitely repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorized as a revelation received from an other, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit,

You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.

You think it’s a game? Unintelligible? Ha! Envision no spoons. This is serious. It is a matter of joy versus emptiness.

All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which must be rooted out.

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

"Batman Begins" leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.

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

Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

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.

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

But anyone who thinks themselves genuinely unbiased is bound to be taken in.

Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.

For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself.

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.

I am gripped by an existential panic.

I really like that homosexuality is a little bit of an existential puzzle.

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.

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.'

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

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

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.

My reading of the threat from Iran is that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the State of Israel and to other countries in the region because the other countries in the region will feel compelling requirement to acquire nuclear weapons as well. Now we cannot a second Holocaust.

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

It is obvious that humanity faces existential threats of a global nature. They are global in the sense that is not possible to deal with them unless we resort to global governance.

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

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

[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.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

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.

Of course, the surest way to free yourself from an existential crisis is through comedy.

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

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!

Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.

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

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

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

Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, The 5th Wave, explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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.

The blues is also existential and offers a sense of mature reflection that enabled it to be the leitmotif of modern life.

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

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 purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

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