Existential Quotes - Page 17

• One doesn't do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Issues, Shy, Therapists

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• In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Loss, Thinking, Numbers

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• If literature is to transcend political interference and return to being a testimony of man and his existential predicament, it needs first to break away from ideology. To be without "isms," is to return to the individual and to return to viewing the world through the eyes of the writer, an individual who relies on his own perceptions and does not act as a spokesman for the people. The people already have rulers and election campaigners speaking in their name.

  Gao Xingjian

  Eye, Men, Names

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• For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Responsibility, Men, Fields

  Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Mark D. Morelli, Elizabeth A. Morelli (1997). “The Lonergan Reader”, p.390, University of Toronto Press

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• The Internet is really our meeting place. We have this amazing listserv. Every time I log onto it I feel a sense of pride, because if you log on and say, "Oh I was just in San Diego and I was in a park and I saw a lion," the flurry of replies on average is just like--wow! All these existential questions about what it means to be an African, and never having seen a lion at home, but having seen a lion here. Everything you say turns into this real philosophical debate--it's incredible in so many ways. And it's an invigorating place to be.

  Chris Abani

  Real, Philosophical, Mean

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• Whether arrived at through reason or revelation, natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.

  Ilana Mercer

  Men, Law, Reason

  "Why The Land Belongs To Bundy". www.economicpolicyjournal.com. April 25, 2014.

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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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• 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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• I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.

  Kate Zambreno

  Thinking, Getting Older, Our Society

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I really like that homosexuality is a little bit of an existential puzzle.

  Guy Branum

  Littles, Homosexuality, Bits

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I seem to have come out of the womb with existential angst and wasn't a happy kid, so I've been on a lifelong search trying to discover how to live the best life possible. I committed my life to doing what I could to experience greater happiness, which ultimately led me to write a book on the subject called Happy for No Reason.

  Marci Shimoff

  Book, Writing, Kids

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• A lot of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute struggles are a bit more taken care of, so it allows you to start asking more existential questions like, "What do I want in life? What's going to make me happy?"

  Paul Rust

  Taken, Struggle, Want

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

  Harold Ramis

  World, Kind, Floats

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.

  Christian Wiman

  Emotional, Lenses, Work And Life

  Source: bigthink.com

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• There's this existential crisis in America and in the West of, like - who am I? - based on this searching for individual fulfillment, which you don't necessarily have in the East in the same way because you're kind of told what to do. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying that's just, like, the reality.

  Aasif Mandvi

  Reality, America, East

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• I will not sleep fine if Donald Trump wins and I will not sleep fine is Hillary Clinton wins. Whether you are looking at nuclear weapons, whether you are looking at expanding wars and their blowback, which will not stop as long as those wars continue to expand, or whether you're looking at the climate, in my view, we have no choice. This is an existential moment. We are deciding not only what kind of world we will have, but whether we will have a world or not. I think it's very important to get outside this box that tells us we are powerless, when in fact, we are powerful.

  Jill Stein

  Powerful, War, Sleep

  "Meet Jill Stein, the Woman Determined to Take On Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in November". Interview with Krystal Marie Ball, www.glamour.com. July 25, 2016.

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• I have a very simple mantra and it's this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That's my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.

  Arthur Jafa

  Spiritual, Simple, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's existential fears I have - losing passion and creativity and just kind of floating through life. When I feel a little lost - pulled away by the noise of what you're supposed to be doing and what your social following is - I go back to the things that inspire me.

  Jimmy Chin

  Passion, Creativity, Inspire

  "An Interview with Richard Branson, Jimmy Chin, and Ben Stookesberry". Interview With Paul Solotaroff, www.mensjournal.com.

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