Best 156 quotes in «existential quotes» category

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!

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 purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

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.

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

Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

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.

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

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

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

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

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.

Though science has given us many marvels, it has also spoiled many of our pleasant dreams.

What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity.

Whether arrived at through reason or revelation, natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.

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

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.

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.

All being experience hunger, that persistent reminder of mortality. The blooming hollow inside all, which affirms that only by taking from without and devouring within can we extend our coil. Hunger is universal for those who are destined to die. As they feed, they pay the incremental bribes that forestall its coming.

All this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew which has grown up on a tiny planet.

And so it was literature that brought me back to life.

...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.

A shaft of sweetness shoots through me from top to toe when the sun rises; I shoulder my gun in silent exaltation.

Because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me.

At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.

Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.

Breaking your inner boundaries is an existential art.

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.

Every year I managed to live on this earth I collect more questions than answers.

...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.

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

Ces ténèbres, Dea les y avait en elle et Gwynplaine les avait sur lui

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 --

Freedom is an existential art.

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.

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

Every plant is an individual. Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual.

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.