Existential Quotes

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.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

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

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

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 do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis.

We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

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.

Im interested in existential films: I love movies that console you in the same way that a person consoles a weeping child.

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

Most people are other people.

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.

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.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

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

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

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

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

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.

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.

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.

The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber.

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.

I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget. Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and existential worth, but not when you're three feet tall.

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.'

So when you're dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as 'we are all toast anyway,' then denial is a pretty good way of coping.

Being on the spiritual path means you want to be a success in an existential sphere, not just on a social level.

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

In every nowhere town There are somewhere dreams.

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.

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

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.

Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear

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.

Start a 'Stop Doing' list. I'll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list

I've always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something's missing.

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.

Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?

Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

I have kind of an existential crisis. I'm in my late 20s, I get excited by contemporary young culture, but at the same time, I don't want to be the 40-year-old DJ in the club.

I am gripped by an existential panic.