Existential Quotes - Page 8

• The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.

  Jayne Ann Krentz

  Attitude, Philosophy, Long

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• To assume that one's existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.

  Merold Westphal

  Tasks, Existentialism, Assuming

  Merold Westphal (2010). “Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society”, p.35, Penn State Press

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• You can't win enough, you can't have enough money, you can't succeed enough. There is not enough. The only thing that will ever satiate that existential thirst is love. And I just remember that day I made the shift from wanting to be a winner to wanting to have the most powerful, deep, and beautiful relationships I could possibly have.

  Will Smith

  Beautiful, Powerful, Winning

  "Will Smith on Kids, His Career, Ferguson, and Failure". Interview with Scott Raab, www.esquire.com. February 12, 2015.

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• ... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

  Lee Friedlander

  Photography, Attention, Chance

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• I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

  Cornel West

  Philosophy, Understanding, Way

  Source: genius.com

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• I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.

  Woody Allen

  Agnostic

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• And, what we've allowed ourselves to become - and this is part of Chris' ideas - is complacent, in allowing our lives to be taken over, or at least in allowing that kind of scrutiny into our lives. We've given up a little bit of that, and this is the existential nightmare of all of that. What happens when you suddenly find out that people have been watching you, with a purpose?

  Remi Aubuchon

  Taken, Ideas, People

  "Executive Producer Remi Aubuchon Exclusive Interview PERSONS UNKNOWN". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. July 5, 2010.

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• The pilot says, "Where do you want to go?" and that's always a rather existential question, because naturally I think a bit about where I want to go, but of course I can't really know where I want to go, in advance. I know it when I see it.

  Michael Light

  Thinking, Want, Pilots

  Interview with Lawrence Weschler, believermag.com. November 1, 2010.

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• There is a core of loneliness. It's partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn't metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards. So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself - I lived through the radio and through my imagination.

  George Carlin

  Mother, Brother, Father

  Interview with Ricky Young, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• I can't imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all.

  David Cronenberg

  Understanding, Imagine, Absurdity

  "David Cronenberg on his incest-heavy Hollywood satire, Maps To The Stars". Interview with Kiva Reardon, www.avclub.com. February 24, 2015.

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• You can learn technological things, you can learn about specific things, but the real problems that people deal with in any subject, existential subjects or romantic subjects, you never learn anything. So you make a fool of yourself when you're 20, you make a fool of yourself at 40, at 60 at 80. The ancient Greeks were dealing with these problems. They screwed up all the time. People do now.

  Woody Allen

  Real, People, Greek

  "Woody Allen Interview To Rome With Love". "MoviesOnline" Interview, www.moviesonline.ca. October 9, 2017.

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• Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.

  Marc Riboud

  Choices, Photographer, Lifetime

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• People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

  Woody Allen

  People, Anxiety, May

  "In Conversation: Woody Allen". Interview with Adam Moss, nymag.com. September 28, 2008.

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• 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.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Reality, Choices, Fundamentals

  Jean-Paul Sartre (1985). “Existentialism and Human Emotions”, Citadel Press

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• The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis.

  Cornel West

  Giving, Suffering, Speak

  Source: genius.com

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• The universe is biased toward consciousness because the universe wants to be noticed. It's a way into existential hope that doesn't have too much cliché wrapped around it.

  John Green

  Too Much, Way, Want

  Interview with Jade Chang, www.goodreads.com. December, 2012.

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• When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.

  Edward Snowden

  Hate, Knowing Everything, People

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• During our religious instruction in school, we always asked: How can one prove the existence of God? And I have learned that the Catholic Church, which is never at a loss for an answer when it comes to existential questions, responds as follows: This question simply does not arise.

  Jean-Claude Juncker

  Religious, School, Loss

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.

  Kiki Dimoula

  Writing, Suffering, Facts

  Source: blog.yupnet.org

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• It is precisely when you are loved a lot that you might realize a second loneliness which is not to be solved but lived. This second loneliness is an existential loneliness that belongs to the basis of our being. It's where we are unfulfilled because only God can fill us.

  Henri Nouwen

  Loneliness, Might, Realizing

  Source: archives.wineskins.org

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• But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

  Lu Xun

  People, Reform, Culture

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• Though science has given us many marvels, it has also spoiled many of our pleasant dreams.

  Lu Xun

  Dream, Spoiled, Given

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• Let those who hanker after the past return to the past! Let those who want to leave the world leave the world! Let those who want to ascend to heaven do so! Let those whose souls want to leave their bodies expire quickly! The earth today should be inhabited by man with a firm hold on the present, a firm hold on the earth.

  Lu Xun

  Past, Men, Heaven

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• You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

  Lu Xun

  Reform, World

  Lu Xun (2014). “Selected Essays of Master Lu Xun”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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• Man is the only animal who does not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem that he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature, and he does not know where he will arrive if he goes forward. Man's existential contradiction results in a state of constant disequilibrium. This disequilibrium distinguishes him from the animal, which lives, as it were, in harmony with nature.

  Erich Fromm

  Home, Animal, Men

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.373, Open Road Media

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