Existential Quotes

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.
Steven Wright

Here, Written, Map

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

Love, Children, Hard

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Jerry Saltz

Work, Art, Nothing

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. Laing

Death, May, Madness

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
Anne Lamott

Great, Mother, Bad

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.
Meg Ryan

Life, Good, Nothing

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

Crisis, Why, Strange

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
Peggy Noonan

Between, Choice, Religious

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
Rose Tremain

Process, Novel, Panic

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.
Bill Moyers

Experience, Gone, Emotion

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.
Archie Shepp

Music, Nothing, After

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.
Friedrich Durrenmatt

Individual, Claim, Dissent

All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.
Josh Radnor

Used, Longer, Obsessed

The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.
Rainn Wilson

Great, American, Show

I'm trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through.
Sean Lennon

Today, Crisis, Through

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness. 'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.
Ray Romano

Attitude, Crisis, After

I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don't know the answer yet.
Ellen Barkin

Good, Emotional, Two

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.
Thomas Lynch

Experience, Meaning, Interested

Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.
Antonio Tabucchi

Life, Teacher, Point

Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.
Robert M. Gates

Israel, Thinks, Nuclear

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.
Paul Ricoeur

God, Decision, Philosophy

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Time, Feeling, Around

I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
Sergey Brin

Young, Among, Mountains

The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat.
Preet Bharara

Greatest, Next, United

So when you're dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as 'we are all toast anyway,' then denial is a pretty good way of coping.
Bob Inglis

Change, Good, Death

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
David Ives

Love, Family, Whether

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Susan B. Anthony

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