Top 100 Existential Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.
Jonathan Franzen
#3. Babies are born because parents feel they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours.
Melissa Broder
#4. The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Jerry Saltz
#5. I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.
Dana Carvey
#6. Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
John Green
#7. 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.
Natasha Lyonne
#8. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.
Naomi Klein
#9. When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.
Ali Liebegott
#10. 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
#12. I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man canna feel the chilly winds o' fate lashing aroound his netheres wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?
Terry Pratchett
#13. The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber.
Michael Mullen
#14. There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.
J. C. Chandor
#15. Four major existential concerns - death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom - play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being and
Irvin D. Yalom
#16. People in third-world countries are less eager to see movies full of angst over existential problems, and who can blame them. They've got other fish to fry. They'd rather see a few great dance routines and the guy end up with the girl.
Alison Owen
#17. I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.
Woody Allen
#18. People use each other
as a healing for their pain. They put each other
on their existential wound,
on the eye, on the cunt, on mouth and open hand.
They hold each other and won't let go.
Yehuda Amichai
#19. Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people for whom this existential space is important.
Pope Benedict XVI
#20. If you ask me, the hypothetical zenith of gaming technology is direct neural interface - no body to hamper you and your brain is in whatever you want it to be in. Plus it leads to existential uncertainty, which could be entertaining.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#22. 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
#23. Using figure B, we can stipulate that an existential risk is equivalent to (i) all red-dot catastrophes, and (ii) any black-dot catastrophe that significantly compromises human well-being.*
Phil Torres
#24. I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.
Steven Wright
#25. I can never be an atheist, because God is our celestial hope for our existential worries, our cosmic chance against absurdity! MMI
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#26. So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn't have TV.
Peter Heller
#27. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.
Lev Grossman
#28. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#29. As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.
Helen Fielding
#30. 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.
David Cronenberg
#31. A lot of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute struggles are a bit more taken care of, so it allows you to start asking more existential questions like, "What do I want in life? What's going to make me happy?"
Paul Rust
#32. I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing.
Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.
Libba Bray
#33. 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
#34. I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
Norman Mailer
#35. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R.D. Laing
#36. Of course, we need stories. There's a reason "42" is not a satisfying answer to life, the universe, and everything. Structure alone doesn't quench our existential thirst. We want meaning. And for our brains, meaning comes in the form of stories.
Amanda Gefter
#37. This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't;
Julian Barnes
#38. Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
Antonio Tabucchi
#39. Disrespect is a symptom of weakness, of smallness, of an existential problem. By acting rude to me he's showing me what he really thinks of himself.
Patricia Cornwell
#40. I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.
Juliana Hatfield
#41. If you can sit all generations of a family down and entertain them and, at the same time, leave them talking about existential notions, then that's fantastic.
Tom Goodman-Hill
#42. There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#43. The existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.
Calvin Trillin
#44. The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.
Sonia Sotomayor
#45. To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.
Jason Silva
#46. ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It's a serious problem overseas, but it's confusing and frightening.
Joe Biden
#47. Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
Aaron Levie
#48. I sometimes look into the face of my dog Stan and see a wistful sadness and existential angst, when all he is actually doing is slowly scanning the ceiling for flies.
Merrill Markoe
#49. Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.
Enrico Fermi
#50. My computer terminal whistles at me: YOU HAVE MAIL. No shit, Sherlock, I always have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would mean that something is very wrong with the world
Charles Stross
#51. If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher
Cameron Adams
#52. Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.
Harold Ramis
#53. Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if 'I'm good.' You don't find oak trees having existential crisis. 'I feel so rotten about myself. I don't produce as much acorns as the one next to me.'
Adyashanti
#54. Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
David Ives
#55. It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide.
Robin Wasserman
#56. A lot of times when you do things where you're killing people, the character is always having an existential crisis about it. It's fun to be no-holds-barred and have no big crisis of conscious.
Rose McGowan
#57. Love can exist only after meditation, not before it. That is a simple existential law. Before meditation - only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows.
Rajneesh
#58. I brought my first fall/winter line to New York, and it was confiscated by U.S. Customs. They asked, 'What is the value of this?' I said, 'I'm not so good with existential questions.'
John Malkovich
#59. I find it funny how I effortlessly combine existential fear with the wish not to be embarrassed. I often think of poor Gregor Samsa first waking up as a bug. This
John Carpmael
#60. A mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.
Lee Friedlander
#61. Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts, we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives.
Jennifer Senior
#62. Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.
Emily Gould
#63. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.
Stephen King
#64. Buddha, tends to suggest a different solution: Wanting is the cause of all human misery. Learn to want less. Accept that life is painful. Face the existential emptiness that is an essential part of our nature.
Anonymous
#65. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don't grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.
Deborah Blum
#66. All gradients of reality, all existential distinctions, have finally been annihilated.
Margaret Wertheim
#67. When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.
Richard Greenberg
#68. I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.
Meg Ryan
#70. For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
Milan Kundera
#72. A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the "Fuck." As in life itself.
Don Winslow
#73. 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.
Rick Yancey
#74. The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
Viktor E. Frankl
#75. Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters - we're cosmically alone.
Ben Shapiro
#76. I never had an existential moment when I asked myself what I was going to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer, and I knew exactly the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.
Alan Dershowitz
#77. So am I dead? How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal.
Joan Frances Turner
#78. Happy, you really are a first-class gloomy bugger," JC said affectionately. "You could gloom for the Olympics, and still take a Bronze in existential paranoia."
Everyone has to be good at something," said Happy smiling in spite of himself.
Simon R. Green
#79. 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.
#80. There's no forsaking what you love
no existential leap
as witnessed here in time and blood
a thousand kisses deep
Leonard Cohen
#81. I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.
Cornel West
#82. 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.
Bruce Lee
#83. You can't escape the existential suffering of life as long as you are living. So get used to it.
Debasish Mridha
#84. Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on."
The older woman poured herself a glass of sangria. "Screw that," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Screw that. Wash your mouth out. Who taught you that half-assed existential drivel?
Armistead Maupin
#85. I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.
Tao Lin
#86. Allow seven months to responsibly train for your first marathon. This will minimize stress to your mind and body and give your existential nature time to incorporate a new way of being.
Gina Greenlee
#87. What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Paul Kalanithi
#88. If your mind is only engaged in the external reality, your life remains far from the existential truth of life.
Roshan Sharma
#89. I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief.
Alan Moore
#90. 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
#91. I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.
Kate Zambreno
#92. Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. For
Thomas Merton
#93. We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.
Joko Beck
#94. 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
#95. The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.
Bill Moyers
#96. You always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line.
Poppy Z. Brite
#97. Of course, the surest way to free yourself from an existential crisis is through comedy.
Jennifer Beals
#98. What a gift it was to be normal! We're all walking on these unseen tightropes when really we could slip at any second and come face to face with all the existential horrors that only lie dormant in our minds.
Matt Haig
#99. Try as I do to comprehend the human project and my part in it, I am further than ever from understanding the monstrous everyday things that seem like self-evident truths and existential necessities to so many.
Michael Leunig
