Existential Quotes - Page 17

• It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Oysters, Shrimp, Matter

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2012). “Being and Nothingness”, p.617, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  Bob Inglis

  Way, Climate, Denial

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• Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

  David Ives

  Play, Love Relationship, Existentialism

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• The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat.

  Preet Bharara

  Bells, Pearls, Next

  "Congress' Profound Failure on Cybersecurity". abcnews.go.com. August 11, 2012.

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• There is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing.

  Jesse Browner

  Crush, Dream, Fear

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• Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.

  Naomi Wolf

  Moving, Clothes, Numbers

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• There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Doe, Slave, Enough

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.99, Open Road Media

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• I went to school, and I remember that you had to do these tests to find out what set you're in - how clever you are. I put down "Kit Harington," and they looked at me like I was completely stupid, and they said, "No, you're Christopher Harington, I'm afraid." It was only then I learnt my actual name. That was kind of a bizarre existential crisis for an 11-year-old to have, but in the end I always stuck with Kit, because I felt that's who I was. I'm not really a "Chris."

  Kit Harington

  Clever, Stupid, School

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old "existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.

  Enrico Fermi

  Epic, People, Feelings

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• I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don't know the answer yet.

  Ellen Barkin

  Meaningful, Kids, Emotional

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• I can never be an atheist, because God is our celestial hope for our existential worries, our cosmic chance against absurdity!" MMI

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Atheist, Worry, Chance

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• When I talk about the pain and hardship of a scientist's life, I'm speaking of more than existential angst. Galileo's work was condemned by the Church; Madame Curie paid with her life, a victim of leukemia wrought by radiation poisoning. Too many of us develop cataracts. None of us gets enough sleep. Most of what we know about the universe we know thanks to a lot of guys (and ladies) who stayed up late at night.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Pain, Sleep, Night

  Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (1993). “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?”, p.16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• [Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ...and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view-i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive.

  Richard Tarnas

  Men, Self, Views

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• 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.

  Natasha Lyonne

  Growing Up, Young, Enjoy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  James C. Collins

  Tasks, Lists, Dilemma

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• Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Solitude, Fiction, Problem

  Jonathan Franzen (2012). “Farther Away: Essays”, p.40, Macmillan

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• There's so much going on in Andrei [Bolkonsky]. He's wrangling with these big existential conundrums, and he tries out different routes to fulfillment. He tries falling in love, that doesn't work. He goes to war and searches for military glory, that doesn't work. He does the quiet life of a farmer. He's always active. That's what I loved about him, he's always looking, searching. He's really inquisitive.

  James Norton

  Falling In Love, Military, War

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've changed over my writing life. If I can generalize, I would say that the more recent poems - believe it or not - are more pointedly political; although, if the earlier poems were more existential, they were still political; though, in their own way, had a complicated presence.

  Gerald Stern

  Believe, Writing, Political

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons.

  Tao Lin

  Writing, Thinking, Issues

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• I feel connected with people because of their sense of humor, worldview, and what they think and feel about certain existential issues (things not affected, in my view, by if someone rides a horse or drives a car or talks only IRL or only by typing), not how old they are, what they use to convey what they think and feel about certain existential issues, or if we have both watched the same TV shows or looked at the same websites.

  Tao Lin

  Horse, Thinking, Issues

  "Tao Lin: They See Me Trolling". Interview with Peter Heyneman, brightestyoungthings.com. February 4, 2011.

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• Life should be lived on the edge of life.

  Philippe Petit

  Should, Edges

  "Man on Wire", www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• The individuation of dharma practice occurs whenever priority is given to the resolution of a personal existential dilemma over the need to conform to the doctrines of a Buddhist orthodoxy. Individuation is a process of recovering personal authority through freeing ourselves from the constraints of collectively held belief systems.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Buddhist, Practice, Priorities

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• I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.

  Norman Mailer

  Fighting, Artist, Discipline

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• Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Founders

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2012). “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”, p.23, Regnery Publishing

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• Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.

  Rollo May

  Drug, Vivid, Matter

  Rollo May (1985). “My Quest for Beauty”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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