Best Existential Quotes

#1. The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

Ernest Becker

#2. Our crisis is no longer material; it's existential, it's spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don't even know what to give a fuck about anymore.

Mark Manson

#3. The existential hero strives for authenticity even when it is costly, lives meaningfully in the midst of a banal, absurd world, and confronts rather than rejecting reality regardless of the personal cost.

Jason Dias

#4. I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#5. Watney snorted in their direction. Then he closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face. It was a nice, boring afternoon.

Andy Weir

#6. I think 'The Searcher' is a departure from my first because it's less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main character is actually the central mystery, and his journey is all about trying to figure himself out.

Simon Toyne

#7. There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.

Robert Musil

#8. You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.

This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.

Kristen Henderson

#9. Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

Caitlin Doughty

#10. No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

Simone De Beauvoir

#11. There's a certain kind of existential freedom that comes to people who realize that all the things that they hold onto and that they think define them, once they're gone, there's this new freedom to determine the way you're going to live your life.

Donal Logue

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

Dalai Lama

#13. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible - time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.

Richard Ford

#14. A series of disconcerting questions nibbles at hearts of troubled youths. These same unanswered questions, along with their acerbic toxins, reveal their pungent fumes more frequently and with greater intensity as a person rushes headfirst into life's concrete jungle.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#15. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan Franzen

#16. My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife.

David Cronenberg

#17. Go mortals, sweat, pant, toil, range the lands and seas to pile up riches you cannot keep; glory that will not last. The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.

Francesco Petrarca

#18. From the Israeli perspective, the fear is that if pressure is off of Iran, Israel would be left having to accept the balance of power in the region significantly shifting toward Iran. It's not an existential threat, but it would definitely be a problem for Israel.

Trita Parsi

#19. I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.

Lu Xun

#20. Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.

Joshua Mohr

#21. It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk-cartons
although I can't remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk-carton
and on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me?

Neil Gaiman

#22. There are anthropogenic state risks at the existential level as well: the longer we live in an internationally anarchic system, the greater the cumulative chance of a thermonuclear Armageddon or of a great war fought with other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, laying waste to civilization.

Nick Bostrom

#23. A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#24. ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict.

Jennifer Senior

#25. To be "great" is an ego goal; to be real is existential.

Osho

#26. The oppressor is truly repressed. Their poverty is existential, often surrounded by an abundance of material goods. (Leonardo Boff, p. 179)

Mev Puleo

#27. Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

Paul Di Filippo

#28. Disciplines are by definition based on territorial epistemologies: studying the borders doesn't lead necessarily to border thinking . . . unless scholars engage in epistemological disciplinary disobedience and bring to the fore the existential experience of dwelling in the border. By

Walter D. Mignolo

#29. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful ... With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.

Elon Musk

#30. Denial is a critical part of the human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds block out our existential fears by focusing on stresses we can handle - like getting to work on time or paying our taxes.

Dan Brown

#31. No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

Andrea Dworkin

#32. 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.

Dale Pendell

#33. Abraham Maslow, I present to you Augustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren.

John Green

#34. It is precisely when you are loved a lot that you might realize a second loneliness which is not to be solved but lived. This second loneliness is an existential loneliness that belongs to the basis of our being. It's where we are unfulfilled because only God can fill us.

Henri Nouwen

#35. 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.

Philip Roth

#36. I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.

Kiki Dimoula

#37. Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

Noah Hawley

#38. The virtues developed here in the age range [around the age of 2] of are trust or faith, and will power and self determination according to the Erickson model. The existential questions being addressed here in this stage are, can one trust the world? and, is it alright to be myself?

Leviak B. Kelly

#39. The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

Rainn Wilson

#40. I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.

Jonathan Lethem