Existential quotes
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Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
-- Albert Camus -
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
-- Albert Camus -
Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.
-- Archie Shepp -
Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.
-- Bo Burnham -
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I am gripped by an existential panic.
-- Bret Easton Ellis -
Zen is not “attained†by mirror-wiping mediation, but by “self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now.†We do not “comeâ€, we “are.†Don't strive to become, but be.
-- Bruce Lee -
The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.
-- Dalai Lama -
I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.
-- Dana Carvey -
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Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear
-- E. F. Schumacher -
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
-- Ernest Becker -
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
-- Ernest Becker -
Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.
-- Esther Perel -
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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.
-- Ilana Mercer -
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.
-- Irvin D. Yalom -
To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.
-- Jason Silva -
I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.
-- John Lahr -
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The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.
-- John Lanchester -
I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.
-- Juliana Hatfield -
...intimacy being reduced to its content of mere sensation, will only be the misleading, obscure, and desperate alleviation of the existential disgust and anguish of him who has stumbled into a blind alley.
-- Julius Evola -
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.
-- Karl Jaspers -
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
-- Kate Atkinson -
I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.
-- Lily Tomlin -
I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. -
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.
-- Paul Tillich -
Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.
-- Paul Tillich -
Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.
-- Ray Brassier -
No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.
-- Simone de Beauvoir -
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Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.
-- Stephanie Zacharek -
Like most human behavior, violence has meaning: it only seems 'senseless' or 'meaningless' to the extent we are unable-or unwilling-to decode it.
-- Stephen A. Diamond -
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.
-- Stephen Hawking -
Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?
-- Tom T. Hall -
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The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
-- Viktor E. Frankl -
Despair is suffering without meaning.
-- Viktor E. Frankl -
Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
-- Viktor E. Frankl -
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!
-- Yves Klein -
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I am afraid of abandonment, and, if you will, in a really existential way, being exposed as a fraud. Everyone's afraid of it, and I definitely am. This is a fear that motivates. Oh, and heights. And getting stabbed.
-- Baron Vaughn -
Terrorism is really the only existential threat to America as we know it - as a free country that plays a leading role in the world.
-- Graham T. Allison -
I really like that homosexuality is a little bit of an existential puzzle.
-- Guy Branum -
I have kind of an existential crisis. I'm in my late 20s, I get excited by contemporary young culture, but at the same time, I don't want to be the 40-year-old DJ in the club.
-- Jacques Greene -
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All gradients of reality, all existential distinctions, have finally been annihilated.
-- Margaret Wertheim -
In every nowhere town There are somewhere dreams.
-- Ron Sexsmith -
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.
-- Torbjorn Tannsjo -
You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.
-- Lu Xun -
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I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.
-- Lu Xun -
Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.
-- Marc Riboud
