Existential Quotes - page 6

Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existential grasp of reality in itself. (Thomas Merton)
Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies. I keep sputtering out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic. View quote
Robert Fulghum
We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work. View quote
Northrop Frye
Art is naturally concerned with man in his existential aspect, not in his scientific aspect. View quote
Colin Wilson
Science leads to great achievements, which, quite rightly, fill of joy those who seek the truth, but if pursued, teaches us that we must seek other sources of ultimate truth and find answers to existential questions about the meaning of life and the mystery of death. View quote
Franco Bassani
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. View quote
Carl Sagan
Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse - exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality. View quote
Wole Soyinka
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage. View quote
Peggy Noonan
[If] our actions have even the slightest effect on the probability of eventual colonization, this will outweigh their effect on when colonization takes place. For standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three and four should consequently be to reduce existential risk. The utilitarian imperative "Maximize expected aggregate utility!”. View quote
Nick Bostrom
Mass culture is a way to escape from the psychological suffering that comes with that insight into the human condition, an escape alternative to the one preached by world religions. Mass culture is a modern invention to escape from existential anguish. View quote
Piero Scaruffi
When I first heard the word existential, I didn't know what it meant. But then I found out that no one knows what it means, so now I use it all the time. (Francine Pascal)
For 25 years, countless of people have stood in front of the United Nations Climate Change conference asking our nations' leaders to stop the emissions. But clearly this has not worked, since the emissions just continue to rise. So I will not ask them anything. Instead, I will ask the people around the world to realize that our political leaders have failed us, because we are facing an existential threat and there is no time to continue down this road of madness. View quote
Greta Thunberg
We are facing an existential crisis... it will have a massive impact on our lives in the future, but also now, especially in vulnerable communities. And I think that we should wake up, and we should also try to wake the adults up, because they are the ones who - their generation is the ones who are mostly responsible for this crisis, and we need to hold them accountable. View quote
Greta Thunberg
I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. View quote
Greta Thunberg
At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn't think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn't be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn't understand how that added up. View quote
Greta Thunberg
In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing. View quote
Paul Tillich
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. View quote
Jerry Saltz
ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It's a serious problem overseas, but it's confusing and frightening. View quote
Joe Biden
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. View quote
Sergey Brin
The foreign directors are always fumbling about in obscurity, and the critics are always writing about the juxtaposition of black and white and the existential dilemma and all that shit, to disguise the fact that they don't understand the first damn thing about it either. View quote
Kirk Douglas
The existential way of understanding human beings has some illustrious progenitors in Western history, such as Socrates in his dialogues, Augustine in his depth-psychological analyses of the self, Pascal in his struggle to find a place for the "heart's reasons which the reason knows not of.” But it arose specifically just over a hundred years ago in Kierkegaard's violent protest against the reigning rationalism of his day Hegel's "totalitarianism of reason,” to use Maritain's phrase. Kierkegaard proclaimed that Hegel's identification of abstract truth with reality was an illusion and amounted to trickery. "Truth exists,” wrote Kierkegaard, "only as the individual himself produces it in action.”. (Rollo May)
The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Mattis still saw Iran as the key destabilizing influence in the region. In private, he could be pretty hard-line, but he had mellowed. Push them back, screw with them, drive a wedge between them and the Russians, but no war. Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO. Mattis, with agreement from Dunford, began saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States. Mattis had formed a close relationship with Tillerson. They tried to have lunch most weeks. Mattis's house was near the State Department and several times Mattis told his staff, "I'll walk down and say hello to him." McMaster considered Mattis and Tillerson "the team of two" and found himself outside their orbit, which was exactly the way they wanted it. View quote
Bob Woodward
Europe's economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis. What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can't make the math add up. View quote
Mark Steyn
I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me. ... His philosophical temper is, I believe, profoundly original and sane. It can of course be misunderstood. But it is basically simple and direct. It seeks, as does all the greatest philosoph­ical thought, to go immediately to the heart of things. Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existential grasp of reality in itself. Such a grasp is necessarily obscure and does not lend itself to abstract analysis. It can be presented in a parable, a fable, or a funny story about a conversation between two philosophers. View quote
Thomas Merton