Existential Quotes

Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.

To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.

...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.

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.

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

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!

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.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

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

One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.

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

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

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

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

Despair is suffering without meaning.

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

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

Life should be lived on the edge of life.

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 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.

Know your magic, trust your magic, use your magic and know that you are a manifestation of life's magic.

Without awareness, we are not truly alive.

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.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.

A paradox arises: the only way to meaning in freedom is through boundaries. The only way that boundaries make any sense at all is through freedom.

I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.

Men who have not known the horror of death are not likely to be awed by it.

...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

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

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

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

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.

I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.

Most people are other people.

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

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

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.

I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.

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.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.