Existential Quotes - Page 6

• Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the “existential vacuum” feeling inner void. Progressive automation causes increasing alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and suicide.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Suicide, Fall, People

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

  Paul Tillich

  Names, Doctrine, Crime

  Paul Tillich (1988). “Writings on religion”

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• there's no forsaking what you love no existential leap as witnessed here in time and blood a thousand kisses deep

  Leonard Cohen

  Kissing, Blood, Leap

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• When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland. When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket, and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map - face of the Earth.

  Barack Obama

  Prayer, Children, Wall

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• Yoga is existential, experiential, experimental. No belief is required, no faith is needed - only courage to experience. And that's what's lacking. You can believe easily because in belief you are not going to be transformed. Belief is something added to you, something superficial. Your being is not changed; you are not passing through some mutation.

  Rajneesh

  Believe, Yoga, Mutation

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• 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.

  Northrop Frye

  Animal, Men, Body

  Northrop Frye (2014). “The Northrop Frye Quote Book”, p.329, Dundurn

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• 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.

  Jacques Greene

  Culture, Kind, Excited

  Source: thump.vice.com

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• I don't think Israelis are less critical of corruption than people in Italy, France or America. Israel is special in a different way. There is a daytime Israel and a nighttime Israel. The first is self-confident, pushy and passionate, like other Mediterranean lands. It is hedonistic, materialistic and almost arrogant. During the nighttime, people are terrified, people are filled with existential dreads. These fears aren't baseless.

  Amos Oz

  Thinking, America, Israel

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom!

  Yves Klein

  Eye, Space, Granted

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. p.15, 1974.

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

  Louis Garrel

  Children, Movie Love, Way

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• "Batman Begins" leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.

  Stephanie Zacharek

  Firsts, Leaks

  "Batman Begins" by Stephanie Zacharek, www.salon.com. June 15, 2005.

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• You're faced with creation, you're faced with something very mysterious and very mystical, whether it's looking at the ocean or being alone in a forest, or sometimes looking at the stars. There's really something very powerful about nature that's endlessly mysterious and a reminder of our humanity, our mortality, of more existential things that we usually manage to not get involved with very often because of daily activity.

  Shirin Neshat

  Stars, Powerful, Ocean

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When you're in [ Bahamas], it feels like a bunch of islands, with keys and things like that. It's an existential archipelago. It's funny, you try to escape who you are and where you're from, but it's always part of your social DNA.

  Tavares Strachan

  Islands, Keys, Dna

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The point of reading is to inhabit a consciousness that doesn't belong to the reader, immersing yourself in a life that's wholly realized. And a huge facet of our psychic and existential make-ups is the things we're not proud of, things we didn't ask to experience, the scenarios we flubbed.

  Joshua Mohr

  Reading, Psychics, Proud

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• I think Bergman's films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

  Woody Allen

  Religious, Communication, Successful

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• There's very few directors I think in this industry that would pitch to a studio that they wanted to do a multi-layered almost at times existential high action, high drama surreal film that's sort of locked in his mind. And then have an opportunity to do that.

  Christopher Nolan

  Drama, Thinking, Opportunity

  Source: collider.com

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• ...intimacy being reduced to its content of mere sensation, will only be the misleading, obscure, and desperate alleviation of the existential disgust and anguish of him who has stumbled into a blind alley.

  Julius Evola

  Love, Blind, Intimacy

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• Rumi is perhaps the greatest mystical poet who ever lived, one of the greatest poets of the Persian language. He was able to express practically all aspects of the spiritual life and our existential situation in the world today as human beings in beautiful Persian poetry.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Beautiful, Spiritual, World

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• 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 .

  Rollo May

  Men, Humanity, Understanding

  Rollo May (1994). “Existence”, p.36, Jason Aronson

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• 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.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Unity, Unbearable

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.385, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  Cornel West

  Expression, Self, People

  Cornel West (1999). “The Cornel West Reader”, p.272, Basic Books

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• I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

  John Lahr

  Dimes, Changed, American Life

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• I think that obviously the quest for purpose, or meaning, or understanding to existence is something that I always think about, always deal with. I guess everybody does - that existential crisis of human condition. It's nothing new. But I'd love to come across something that really made me believe in something.

  Conor Oberst

  Believe, Thinking, Understanding

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Albert Camus

  Philosophy, Thinking, Telling The Truth

  "Resistance, Rebellion, and Death" by Albert Camus, "Pessimism and Tyranny", 1960.

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• A true religion will have the humbleness to admit that only a few things are known, much more is unknown, and something will always remain unknowable. That 'something' is the target of the whole spiritual search. You cannot make it an object of knowledge, but you can experience it, you can drink of it, you can have the taste of it - it is existential.

  Rajneesh

  Motivational, Spiritual, Target

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