Top 100 Existential Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. To be "great" is an ego goal; to be real is existential.
Osho
#4. The oppressor is truly repressed. Their poverty is existential, often surrounded by an abundance of material goods. (Leonardo Boff, p. 179)
Mev Puleo
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Abraham Maslow, I present to you Augustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren.
John Green
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.
Jonathan Lethem
#19. 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
#20. The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.
Dalai Lama
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.
This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness.
Kristen Henderson
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.
Lu Xun
#38. When life is an existential suffering, death is our ultimate blessings.
Debasish Mridha
#39. Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. ( ... ) I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.
Albert Camus
#40. Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#41. When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.
Edward Snowden
#42. It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#43. It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.
Gene Weingarten
#44. And desires are never here and now - they are non-existential. They are just mental, in the mind. And they cannot be fulfilled because their very nature is to move into the future.
Rajneesh
#45. Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy. I sometimes imagine God only knows what, that everyone is laughing at me, the entire world, and at such moments, at such moments I am quiet simply ready to annihilate the entire order of things.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#46. I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#47. 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
#48. I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Norman Mailer
#49. 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.
Patrick Modiano
#50. 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
#51. He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn't want to sound too French about it.
Kevin Barry
#52. Why are we here doing all this stuff...? Even that doubt is starting to feel hazy, as if it might melt away at any moment.
Ao Jyumonji
#53. The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.
Erich Fromm
#54. They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.
Antonio Porchia
#55. There are other men, and other lives, and time still to be.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#56. Optimism ... is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.
Charlie Pierce
#57. This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment. (p. 286)
Eugene Taylor
#58. But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. The hypostatic union, or the union of the divine and human natures in the One Person of the Word, the God-Man, Jesus Christ, was not only a truth of the greatest, most revolutionary, and most existential actuality, but it was the central truth of all being and all history.
Thomas Merton
#60. Being on the spiritual path means you want to be a success in an existential sphere, not just on a social level.
Jaggi Vasudev
#61. The pilot says, "Where do you want to go?" and that's always a rather existential question, because naturally I think a bit about where I want to go, but of course I can't really know where I want to go, in advance. I know it when I see it.
Michael Light
#62. I really like that homosexuality is a little bit of an existential puzzle.
Guy Branum
#63. I'm not on drugs, Ben. I'm having an existential crisis.
Kim Fielding
#64. I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.
Carrie Brownstein
#65. Each person must implement their preferred problem solving method to address existential questions pertaining to life and death, living and loving, working and playing, resting and restructuring.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#66. I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.
Italo Calvino
#67. Acts of violence
Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death
and the meaninglessness of killing.
Dag Hammarskjold
#68. 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.'
Spalding Gray
#69. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.
Paul Kalanithi
#70. We may not know where we are or where we are going, but we have to go.
Debasish Mridha
#71. There's a real existential anxiety at having to exist not just in a generalised social framework, but a capitalist social framework.
Autre Ne Veut
#73. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.
H.P. Lovecraft
#74. ( ... ) a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.
Andrzej Wajda
#76. The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance.
Greg Sestero
#77. Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.
Viktor E. Frankl
#78. Bob, I quickly learned, had an existential view of the Iraq war.
Phil Klay
#79. Your clothing is not - how do we say? - not in harmony with the evening. Your shoes - oh, your shoes! I could write several depressing poems in the styling of Monsieur Camus about the existential problems posed by your shoes.
Christopher Bunn
#80. I'm interested in existential films: I love movies that console you in the same way that a person consoles a weeping child.
Louis Garrel
#81. In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself - as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light - so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.
Martin Heidegger
#82. Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.
Paul Park
#83. I had an existential crisis at the Oscars, sitting next to Sean Penn and Meryl Streep, and being like, 'What am I doing here? I don't belong here'. I felt like it could all be taken away.
Amy Adams
#84. At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.
Jack Kerouac
#86. People are searching for reasons for believing, searching for answers to the big existential questions of "Why am I here?" and "What is life all about?" I find that people are able to accept the teaching of the Gospel when it's presented to them in both a rational and positive way.
Jonathan Morris
#87. Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.
Yukio Mishima
#88. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Viktor E. Frankl
#90. The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.
Christian Wiman
#91. 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
#92. ... The individual is still obliged to confer the legitimacy of mutually antagonistic values, for even though the array of ultimate values may contract with the rationalization of the world, one is never relieved from the existential burden of choice ('taking a stand').
Nicholas Gane
#93. People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.
Woody Allen
#94. You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.
Lu Xun
#95. You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?
Patricia Marx
#96. The way the function dictates the form ... elegant lines ... nothing extraneous ... this shoe perfectly expresses the essence of shoeness.
David Mazzucchelli
#97. Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#98. In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life
Paul Auster
#99. Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.
Archie Shepp
#100. Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know
Simone De Beauvoir
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
