Quotes About Existential

Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

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.

The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox … of trying to meet the threat to our values and institutions by methods which themselves endangered these institutions. Here was an existential dilemma of the cold war: using undemocratic methods to defend American democracy. But Eisenhower believed that the ends would justify the means when the issue was national survival.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. —VIKTOR FRANKL, Auschwitz survivor and founder of Logotherapy, Man's Search for Meaning

busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or cover up some fear at the center of our lives.

All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things. All my life I have suffered from bad dreams. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.

El pecado es el único elemento colorido que queda en la vida moderna

Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It's like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it's about nothing—just a jumble.

Squiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?' 'Oh, rather!' 'What do you do about it?' 'I generally take a couple of cocktails.

Quién soy en esta ciudad muerta?...No entiendo sino las cenizas.

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being

If I turn on the television because I cannot stand an evening alone with myself or my family, I am admitting my citizenship with the living dead.

Denial is a critical part of the human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds block out our existential fears by focusing on stresses we can handle—like getting to work on time or paying our taxes. If we have wider, existential fears, we jettison them very quickly, refocusing on simple tasks and daily trivialities.

La negación es parte fundamental del mecanismo de supervivencia humana. Sin ella, despertaríamos cada mañana aterrorizados, pensando en las innumerables formas en que podríamos morir. En cambio, nuestra mente bloquea esos miedos existenciales centrándose solo en las tensiones que puede afrontar, como llegar al trabajo a tiempo o pagar los impuestos.

La mente bloquea nuestros miedos existenciales y se centra en cuestiones que podamos afrontar, como llegar a tiempo al trabajo o pagar nuestros impuestos. Para sobrevivir, nos deshacemos de los miedos existenciales tan rápido como podemos, y dedicamos la atención a tareas simples y trivialidades diarias.

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.

Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.

What has happened to me? Why am I so alone in the world?

Me, a nothingness zombie in a nothingness box in a nothingness hell.

I don't want to die, I thought. Not again.

I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.