Existential Quotes

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it. (Steven Wright)
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. View quote
Rose Tremain
I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst. View quote
Meg Ryan
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. View quote
Sean Lennon
Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level - man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology. View quote
Rollo May
As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings. View quote
Thomas Ligotti
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaninglessness in rational terms. View quote
Viktor Frankl
A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. View quote
Viktor Frankl
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. View quote
Norman Mailer
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. View quote
Lily Tomlin
The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual. (Friedrich Dürrenmatt)
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. View quote
Ronald David Laing
I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false. View quote
Albert Camus
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. View quote
Northrop Frye
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. View quote
Erich Fromm
The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence. View quote
Paul Tillich
In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people. View quote
Cornel West
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
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. View quote
Rick Yancey
Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, The 5th Wave, explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us. (Rick Yancey)
Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher. View quote
Antonio Tabucchi
The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace. View quote
Rainn Wilson
We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die. View quote
Charlotte Joko Beck
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. View quote
Albert Murray