Quotes About Existential

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.

I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

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.

Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.

How can I die alone.Where will I be then who am now alone,what groans so patheticallyin this room where I am alone?

It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide.

We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.

We have nothing to live but life itself.

Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here?

My driver asked, "Sir, do you have everything you need?" Which in an existential sense was a very big question, but I had no immediate requirements, so I just nodded in the mirror and stayed quiet.

The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man's becoming absolutely homeless.

What's the use of praying if there's nobody who hears?

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

I'm not sure about life after this; god knows I'm not a spiritual man.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

The meaning of life is life itself

Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain.

Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.

We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat —and the boat is perpetually sinking.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.