Best 156 quotes in «existential quotes» category

We are snowflakes, melting on the tongue of the universe.

We believe because it gives us faith. It gives us the willingness to go through our day, to keep the existentialist threat of meaninglessness away. We believe because we crave to be seen, to be known, to be understood. We believe because that is the only thing we can do. If there is no one to judge us - to tell us that we are good, and that if we are bad, we can be redeemed - why bother living at all? Why bother being good at all? If there is no one to look after us, and we are truly alone in this universe, what purpose do we have? We have nothing but the present moment, and only temporariness.

We co-existed in peaceful detachment

Welcome to Planet Earth, find your existential avant-garde.

We're really endless in a way. If time goes on forever, then any way you divide it is also forever. A tenth of infinity is infinity. It's only us that think the time is gone. It isn't. We're still there. Still at our wedding. Still on honeymoon. All the good times are still happening. Even in the middle of the bad times to come, we'll still be together. Forever, in a way.

What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short. But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it’s the common lot, even I was not immune, if that may be called an erection. It did not escape her naturally, women smell a [23] rigid phallus ten miles away and won­der, How on earth did he spot me from there? One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably. What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us.

What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short. But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it’s the common lot, even I was not immune, if that may be called an erection. It did not escape her naturally, women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away and won­der, How on earth did he spot me from there? One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably. What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

What are people but deaths that haven't happened yet?

When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.

When I arrived the News was three years old and Ed Lotterman was on the verge of a breakdown. To hear him talk you would think he'd been sitting at the very cross-corners of the earth, seeing himself as a combination of God, Pulitzer and the Salvation Army. He often swore that if all the people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The Almighty--if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their deviations--there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his hair.

Who cares what we dream about? Just getting through each day is hard enough.

When it has finished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it can say it at length, the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.

Whether it is rational or empirical, your approach to life must always be empathetic. Emotional intelligence is acquired when knowledge and empathy are combined and applied to situations regularly in everyday life.

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...

Will I stick to the eternity Of never trying? Or will I challenge the uncertainty Of what can happen If I see you again?

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

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,

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

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

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

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.

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

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.

I am gripped by an existential panic.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

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.