Best 156 quotes in «existential quotes» category

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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'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.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.

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.

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