Existential Quotes - Page 3

• Whereever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Life, Stars, Clouds

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• One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

  Norman Mailer

  Weed, War, Marijuana

  Interview in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series" edited by George Plimpton, 1967.

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• Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Nature, Roots, Profound

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• All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

  Rumi

  Thinking, Night, Ideas

  Rumi (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.29, Penguin UK

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• the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

  Ernest Becker

  Analysis, Existentialism, Problem

  Ernest Becker (2014). “The Denial of Death”, p.79, Souvenir Press

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• Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

  Rollo May

  Nihilism, Becoming, Ethical

  Rollo May (1994). “Existence”, p.36, Jason Aronson

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• To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth-intellect ually and emotionally-and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

  Chris Hedges

  Struggle, Ecosystems, Understanding

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• Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Responsibility, Might, Existentialism

  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.165, Open Road Media

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• You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

  Germaine Greer

  Life, Happy Birthday, Happiness

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• The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Strong, Opposites

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• All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Hands, Alive, Philosopher

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1996). “The Vision of Nietzsche”, Element Books Limited

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• Most people are other people.

  Oscar Wilde

  People

  Letter to Alfred Douglas, Jan. - Mar. 1897

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• Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance.

  Stephen A. Diamond

  Integrity, Acceptance, Blessing

  Stephen A. Diamond (1996). “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”, p.233, SUNY Press

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• Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.

  Rollo May

  Unique, Men, Self

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• I would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Meaningful, Men, Long

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• I am absolutely against positive thinking. You will be surprised that if you don't choose, if you remain in a choiceless awareness, your life will start expressing something which is beyond both positive and negative, which is higher than both. So you are not going to be a loser. It is not going to be negative, it is not going to be positive, it is going to be existential.

  Rajneesh

  Positive Thinking, Being Positive, Negative

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• Like students going to school, the planes on their bombing missions fly over Beijing each morning. And each time I hear their engines attack the air I feel a certain slight tension, as if I were witnessing the invasion of Death, though this heightens my consciousness of the existence of Life.

  Lu Xun

  Morning, School, Air

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• Without awareness, we are not truly alive.

  James Bugental

  Alive, Awareness

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• It is absolutely impossible for a subject to see or have insight into something while leaving itself out of the picture, so impossible that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Opposites, Knowing, Leaving

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2012). “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”, p.83, Regnery Publishing

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• I'm simply a nonbeliever and have been forever. ... I'm interested in saying, 'Let us discuss the existential question. We are all going to die, that is the end of all consciousness. There is no afterlife. There is no God. Now what do we do.' That's the point where it starts getting interesting to me.

  David Cronenberg

  Afterlife, Interesting, Forever

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• We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remains—we can't know.

  James Redfield

  Smart, Animal, Knowing

  James Redfield (2011). “The Tenth Insight: A Pocket Guide (Storycuts)”, p.49, Random House

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• What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity.

  Stephen A. Diamond

  Choices, Humanity, Determined

  Stephen A. Diamond (1996). “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”, p.179, SUNY Press

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• I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

  Anne Lamott

  Children, People, Needs

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• Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

  Tim Winton

  Pay, Horror, Humour

  Source: www.readings.com.au

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• In every nowhere town
  There are somewhere dreams.

  Ron Sexsmith

  Dream, Towns

  "Song: 'Love Shines'". 2011.

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