Existential Quotes - Page 5

• I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Thinking, Knowing, Half

  "Portlandia Brings Out the Fan in Carrie Brownstein" by Scott Thill, www.wired.com. January 06, 2012.

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• Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.

  Esther Perel

  Sometimes, Longing, Elsewhere

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• The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether
  it's in the arts, sciences, or business.

  Teresa Amabile

  Art, Creativity, Challenges

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• Good therapy, gently but firmly, moves people out of denial and compartmentalization. It helps clients to develop richer inner lives and greater self-knowledge. It teaches clients to live harmoniously with others and it enhances Existential consciousness, and allows people to take responsibility for their effects on the world at large. For me , happiness is about appreciating what one has. Practically speaking,this means lowering expectations about what is fair, possible and likely. It means,finding pleasure in the ordinary.

  Mary Pipher

  Moving, Mean, Responsibility

  Mary Pipher (2009). “Letters to a Young Therapist: Stories of Hope and Healing”, p.16, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Our greatest challenge today is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.

  Kirk J. Schneider

  Couple, Mean, Challenges

  Kirk J. Schneider (1990). “The Paradoxical Self: Toward an Understanding of Our Contradictory Nature”, Prometheus Books

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• A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

  Rollo May

  Giving, World, Patterns

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• Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

  Paul Tillich

  Philosophical, Philosophical Questions, Answers

  Paul Tillich (1988). “Writings on religion”

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• The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.

  Edgar Mitchell

  Live Life, Profound, Feelings

  Edgar Mitchell (2009). “The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.284, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Thinking, Hands, People

  "Creating Purpose" by Jen Grisanti, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 12, 2011.

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• One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Feelings, Excellent, Oneself

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1997). “Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life”, p.131, Basic Books

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• The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

  Rajneesh

  Capacity To Love, People, Looks

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• Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

  Albert Camus

  Believe, Blue, Sky

  Albert Camus (1960). “The plague: translated from the French”

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• Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

  Albert Camus

  Forever, Psychology, Logic

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.19, Vintage

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• Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time.

  Arthur Kleinman

  Strong, Philosophy, Book

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• Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.

  Joshua Mohr

  Jobs, Wrestling, Dawn

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• All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fashion, Government, Fake

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• I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Integrity, Existentialism, Mistrust

  The Twilight of the Idols "Maxims and Arrows" sec. 26 (1888) (translation byWalter Kaufmann)

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• Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

  Ernest Becker

  Fall, Denial Of Death, Ideals

  Ernest Becker (1997). “The Denial of Death”, p.204, Simon and Schuster

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• That is the simple secret of happiness. Whatever you are doing, don’t let past move your mind; don’t let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet. To live in the memories, to live in the imagination, is to live in the non-existential. And when you are living in the non-existential, you are missing that which is existential. Naturally you will be miserable, because you will miss your whole life.

  Rajneesh

  Spiritual, Memories, Moving

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• I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.

  Libba Bray

  Tailgates, Body, Trunks

  Libba Bray (2009). “Going Bovine”, p.292, Delacorte Books for Young Readers

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• Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Annoyed, Suffering, World

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• (although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

  Kate Atkinson

  Brain, Half, Gloom

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• As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.

  Helen Fielding

  Wrestling, Dying Alone, Balance

  Helen Fielding (2013). “The Bridget Jones Omnibus: The Singleton Years: Bridget Jones's Diary & The Edge of Reason”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

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• The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Crazy, Thoughtful, People

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Did television execs have souls? Now, that was an existential question and a half.

  J.R. Ward

  Soul, Television, Half

  J.R. Ward (2011). “J.R. Ward The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8”, p.2682, Penguin

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