Existential Quotes

Existential Quote of the day

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.

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

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.

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.

Sometimes my poetry is an attempt to keep off existential terror; sometimes it is a grappling with philosophical problems; sometimes just fun.

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

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

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

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

Seeing no resolution to my existential recognition of loss, I decide to eat lunch.

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

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe. - Julia Louis

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

Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes.

Despair is suffering without meaning.

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

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

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

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?

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 reject the idea that there is some sort of existential "clash of civilizations." I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort.

Life should be lived on the edge of life.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

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.

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness.'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth.

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.

Of course, the surest way to free yourself from an existential crisis is through comedy.

All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.

I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.

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.

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

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.

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

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

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

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

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

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

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann represent an existential threat to the Democratic Party the way that twenty years ago Clarence Thomas as a black man represented to liberals and the Democratic Party.