Existential Quotes

“I was oblivion.”

— Gabino Iglesias

Most people are other people.

— Oscar Wilde

“We co-existed in peaceful detachment”

— Tsitsi Dangarembga

“Today is the first day of the rest of your existential crisis.”

— John McGill

I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.

— Lu Xun

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

— Ernest Becker

“There’s real evil, Mr Honey. Not that existential crap, either.”

— Laird Barron

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

— Simone de Beauvoir

“You are the door of the doorless rooms.”

— Emir Demirkiran

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

— Ernest Becker

We like existentially wacky characters who exist in existential crisis.

— Joe Russo

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.

— Simone de Beauvoir

“I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.”

— Jonathan Lethem

All gradients of reality, all existential distinctions, have finally been annihilated.

— Margaret Wertheim

“There are no laws, only habits of existence so deep that to break them would require unmaking the world that contains them.”

— PIERRE LAGRENAT

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

— Lu Xun

All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which…

— Lu Xun

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

— Aaron Levie

For me, empathy is an existential question - it's about the survival of the human race. That is, it's imperative for us…

— Daniel Lubetzky

I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender…

— Kiki Dimoula

Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to…

— Rollo May

I'm really enjoying growing up. I feel like so much of my life was in an existential crisis when I was young,…

— Natasha Lyonne

That existential crisis is something you rarely see portrayed by black characters; the idea that people think about their own existence and…

— Boots Riley

The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its…

— Robert Jay Lifton

“There is that difference between being kicked in the teeth and reading a description of being kicked in the teeth. Some call…

— Gita Mehta

“Maybe the path went in a circle. Maybe there was a more gradual, friendly slope back up the mountain so he wouldn't…

— Drew Magary

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach -…

— Nick Bostrom

[Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious…

— Richard Tarnas

“Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural…

— Christian Smith

Let those who hanker after the past return to the past! Let those who want to leave the world leave the world!…

— Lu Xun

Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to…

— Stephen A. Diamond

A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger -- especially at danger in the social sciences -- of…

— Rollo May

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account…

— William James

During our religious instruction in school, we always asked: How can one prove the existence of God? And I have learned that…

— Jean-Claude Juncker

Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?

— Tom T. Hall

“You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.”

— Isaac Hooke

“Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.”

— Virgil

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

— Archie Shepp

“What do you do? As if existence requires a résumé.”

— MissFit Writes