Existential Quotes

When I die, I wonder what will happen to me. Is there some place like heaven, and will I be able to meet you there someday? I don't know. There's no way to know. No one knows what comes after death. But at the very least, we won't be able to talk until then.There's a wide, deep and fast running river between the living and the dead. Once you cross that river, no matter what happens, you're never coming back. It's a one way trip.

Ao Jyumonji

Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --

Tom Stoppard

Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.

Patrick Modiano

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel the mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you make might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids have a better life? Or the day we realize that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live.

Matthew Sanford

They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

Hunter S. Thompson

Would any of you like to share your career aspirations within the class? Jim?I dunno, to be honest, I was just hoping to be able to keep the demons away...

Jillian Tamaki

...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.

Italo Calvino

Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?' again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. 'It's intolerable you know

Simone de Beauvoir

Let us see what words can do. Will you understand me, for a start, if I tell you that I have never known what I am? My vices, my virtues, are under my nose, but I can’t see them, nor stand far enough back to view myself as a whole. I seem to be a sort of flabby mass in which words are engulfed; no sooner do I name myself than what is named is merged in him who names, and one gets no farther. I have often wanted to hate myself and, as you know, had good reasons for so doing. But my attempted hatred of myself was absorbed into my insubstantiality and was nothing but a recollection. I could not love myself either, I am sure, though I have never tried to. But I was eternally compelled to be myself; I was my own burden, but never burdensome enough, Mathieu. For one instant, on that June evening when I elected to confess to you, I thought I had encountered myself in your bewildered eyes.You saw me, in your eyes I was solid and predictable; my acts and moods were the actual consequences of a definite entity. And through me you knew that entity. I described it to you in my words, I revealed to you facts unknown to you, which had helped you to visualize it. And yet you saw it, I merely saw you seeing it. For one instant you were the heaven-sent mediator between me and myself, you perceived that compact and solid entity which I was and wanted to be in just as simple and ordinary a way as I perceived you. For, after all, I exist, I am, though I have no sense of being; and it is an exquisite torment to discover in oneself such utterly unfounded certainty, such unsubstantiated pride. I then understood that one could not reach oneself except through another’s judgment, another’s hatred. And also through another’s love perhaps; but there is here no question of that. For this revelation I am not ungrateful to you. I do not know how you would describe our present relations. Not goodwill, nor wholly hatred. Put it that there is a corpse between us. My corpse.

Jean-Paul Sartre

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

Saul Bellow

I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

Ralph Ellison

...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

Calvin Trillin

Every plant is an individual.Wrong again. We are not individuals at all, we are all connected. We are individuals the way each blossom on an apple tree is an individual.

Dale Pendell

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if hehasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that youcan’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in themoment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

Henry Miller

Out of the decisions that we make in life, our Self emerges. What we choose in life is not the thing chosen out there, but oneself.

Luis Enrique Cavazos

When it has finished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it can say it at length, the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.

Francis Ponge

Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not...it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier – here or there. The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home. But they wouldn't let him go home.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me--how to be?

Joseph Conrad

Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.

Hunter S. Thompson

You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.

Isaac Hooke

Let me not anchor you to a bed of weary rocks, but let me be the kite’s string that guides you in your flight.

Richard Ronald Allan

Carry me like change in your pocket and spend me as you wish.

Richard Ronald Allan

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

Yukio Mishima

The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.

William James

otThere’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

Steven Hall

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

Hermann Hesse

Imagine the universe is like this cloth.” Philippos said, lifting up an old rag off the ground. “There are thousands of tiny threads woven in tiny, little patterns. If you follow one thread it will lead you to the end, but also you’ll see that more threads are connected to it. What if you decide to follow another? Where would that lead you? And if you cut one thread, what would happen to the cloth then? Would it fray until it fell apart? Or would it just change pattern?” he paused thoughtfully. “Wielders like you can see those possibilities. You can follow the threads and see where they begin and end, where and how they connect with everything else and what might happen if something changes along the way.

D.M. Enslin

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

Alastair Reynolds

The sea was no stranger to the rock on the beach. The sea came often to the rock, rushing up wetly against its warm grey, and always as it swept away it took an infinitesimal part of the rock with it. The rock had known the waves for a long time, and learned it was in its nature to erode.

Chew Chia Shao Wei

I always thought I wasn't afraid to die. No... no one is afraid of death itself. Your pain and suffering is over in an instant. What really makes me suffer... Is seeing you crying over me... From the darkness of the Milky Way.I'm sorry... Please don't make that face. You look best shdn you're smiling, you know.

Inio Asano

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

Jean-Paul Sartre

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

Greg Egan

With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.

Søren Kierkegaard

Now you see. We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside of ourselves diminishes us -- because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside of us, are illusions that make us forget the emptyness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough.

Tirumalai S. Srivatsan

There’s real evil, Mr Honey. Not that existential crap, either.

Laird Barron

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

Hunter S. Thompson

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.

Saul Bellow

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic.

Viktor E. Frankl

We all have an opportunity and responsibility to create a legacy. A legacy which is resilient, sustainable and authentic." - Jim Cookson, Doctoral Student, Ashridge Business School, UK, August 2014

Jim Cookson

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

Steven Hall

They say I don’t exist. They say I am an extension, an indulgence, imagination of a schizophrenic person.

Faiz Shaikh

Love transports mortal beings to the existential plane of spiritual eternity transcending the emotional, mental, and physical limitations of an inaccurately perceived finite existence.

Ken Poirot

I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)

IRVIN D.YALOM

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.

Leo Tolstoy

There was something vaguely sad about the rock. It was as old as it looked, standing weathered and lonely amidst the stretch of sand, and its thoughts were quiet as it listened to the waves.

Chew Chia Shao Wei

You think it’s a game?Unintelligible? Ha!Envision no spoons.This is serious.It is a matter of joyversus emptiness.

Kristen Henderson

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us.

Asghar Abbas

How do text messages make you feel existential?I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.

Adi Alsaid

Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.

Abhijit Naskar

Each person must implement their preferred problem solving method to address existential questions pertaining to life and death, living and loving, working and playing, resting and restructuring.

Kilroy J. Oldster

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for. We all know that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end, and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say... I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.

Douglas Adams

In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire--in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation--that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for life-in-itself clothes itself in the sex drive--belongs to the particularity of being human.

Christos Yannaras

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1965 and jumped to the section entitled “Junitaki Today.” Of course, the book’s “today” being 1970, it was hardly today’s “today.” Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a “today.” And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history.

Haruki Murakami

From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.

Suzy Kassem

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann

Take fireflies for example. Try to imagine their beauty, the evanescent beauty of their lives, which don't even last a week.Female fireflies flash their lights only to have intercourse with the males; males twinkle just to have intercourse with the females. And once their mating has finished, they die. In short, their reproductive instinct is the single, absolute reason for fireflies to live. In that simple instinct and their simple world, no kind of sadness can intervene. This is precisely why fireflies are so fleetingly beautiful.

Tatsuhiko Takimoto

All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

Kilroy J. Oldster

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

Dag Hammarskjöld

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Existential Quotes

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