Existential Quotes - Page 18

• Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Grief, Agony, Profound

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

  Karl Jaspers

  Demand, World, Driven

  Karl Jaspers (1997). “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity”, p.60, JHU Press

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• Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Encounters, Patient, Isolation

  Irvin D. Yalom (1980). “Existential Psychotherapy”, p.406, Basic Books

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• 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 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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