Existential Quotes - Page 9

• I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.

  Woody Allen

  Agnostic

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• I believed Afghanistan was always going to be hard. It's the fifth poorest country in the world. And when you fly over it, you realize that there's not much there. And, of course, it has the problem, too, of being on that border with Pakistan in basically an ungoverned region that has given the terrorists a staging ground. So it's a very difficult place. But I do believe that the mission there can succeed if success is defined as helping the Afghans to prevent the Taliban from being an existential threat to the Afghan government.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Country, Believe, World

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• Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty.

  Paul Tillich

  Anxiety, Doubt, Castles

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• [Jean-Paul] Sartre was a throwback to the existential period. I'm not really so much into that these days. I went through a period of going over things and looking at them again to see what they were. But I'm into psychiatry type things. I'm into philosophy. I'm into that sort of thing.

  Van Morrison

  Philosophy, Type, These Days

  Source: ritchieyorke.com

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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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• Like most human behavior, violence has meaning: it only seems 'senseless' or 'meaningless' to the extent we are unable-or unwilling-to decode it.

  Stephen A. Diamond

  Violence, Behavior, Humans

  Stephen A. Diamond (1996). “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”, p.9, SUNY Press

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• Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Destiny, Arbitrary, Stranger

  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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

  Edith Wharton

  Strong, Blood, Years

  Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.2054, Delphi Classics

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• The caliphate will have been dismantled. It will still be a problem, but that has been our focus because that is the greatest existential threat to U.S. interests.

  Joe Biden

  Focus, Problem, Threat

  Source: www.pbs.org

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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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• 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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• ...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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• 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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• All of the action, and the Wild West West fun, crazy, HBO stuff is in there and it's all amazing, but what separates the show [ Westworld] is that it's an existential drama. It's an intellectual nightmare. It is all very much based in reality. A lot of the technologies that we're exploring is stuff that we're working at, right now. All of this is not that far away. It's taking a look at humanity and the state that we're in now and what would happen, if we kept on going the way that we're going and we created this artificial intelligence.

  Evan Rachel Wood

  Fun, Crazy, Drama

  Source: collider.com

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• One of the dangers [that Donald Trump poses, due to the augmented risk of nuclear war] is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats - the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species - one of them, climate change, on that I think there's no basis for discussion.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, Two

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.

  Leonard Cohen

  Song, Art, Reality

  "Leonard Cohen at 80". Interview with Mark Ellen, www.thetimes.co.uk. September 19, 2014.

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• Because imaginary time behaves like another direction in space, histories in imaginary time can be closed surfaces, like the surface of the Earth, with no [existential] beginning or end.

  Stephen Hawking

  Space, Earth, Surface

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• When you are totally defeated you begin again to enjoy the small things around you. Just going to the mountains, not for victory or glory, but to enjoy nature or enjoy fine people. If you always succeed you enjoy the admiration of many people. Being defeated means being limited to the basis existential choices of life. If you can enjoy the quiet evening hours it is beautiful; a hero who always succeeds may not have time to enjoy such things.

  Wojciech Kurtyka

  Beautiful, Hero, Mean

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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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• 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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