1.
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
I enjoy regularly plunging into a profound mental desolation where I become completely disconnected from my identity and self-esteem.
2.
To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.
Jason Silva
3.
...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
4.
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
5.
You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.
Lu Xun
6.
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
7.
Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.
Ray Brassier
8.
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
9.
The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.
Rollo May
10.
One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
11.
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
Rollo May
12.
The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.
Dalai Lama
13.
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
Albert Camus
14.
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.
Robert A. Heinlein
15.
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
Paulo Freire
16.
The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.
Viktor E. Frankl
18.
I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.
Lu Xun
20.
Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.
Norman Mailer
21.
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
23.
Know your magic, trust your magic, use your magic and know that you are a manifestation of life's magic.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
24.
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
26.
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
27.
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Albert Camus
28.
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.
Clark Moustakas
29.
Men who have not known the horror of death are not likely to be awed by it.
Lu Xun
30.
I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.
Libba Bray
31.
...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.
Paul Tillich
32.
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
33.
Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.
Marc Riboud
35.
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
36.
I really like that homosexuality is a little bit of an existential puzzle.
Guy Branum
37.
Though science has given us many marvels, it has also spoiled many of our pleasant dreams.
Lu Xun
38.
I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.
Woody Allen
40.
I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.
Dana Carvey
41.
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
42.
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
Roger Ebert
44.
A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
Albert Camus
45.
One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.
Friedrich Nietzsche
46.
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest Becker
47.
Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.
Archie Shepp
48.
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.
49.
People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
Terence McKenna
50.
In every nowhere town
There are somewhere dreams.
Ron Sexsmith