Non Existential Quotes & Sayings

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. — Leo Tolstoy

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. — Christopher Lasch

Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence ... There are realms of reality or - more exactly - of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing. — Paul Tillich

To be or not to be. God's gift to animals is they don't get a choice. — Chuck Palahniuk

My robust lexicon notwithstanding, I struggle to find the right words to describe just how much I despise, hate, abhor, revile, detest and categorically abominate anything to do with home maintenance. While cooking strikes me as an essentially creative act, cleaning seems little more than an exercise in decay management, enough to trigger an existential crisis each time the ring around the toilet bowl reappears. — Rachel Held Evans

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

existential overload — David Michie

The Prophet's life is an invitation to a spirituality that avoids no question and teaches us - in the course of events, trials, hardships, and our quest - that the true answers to existential questions are more often those given by the heart than by the intelligence. Deeply, simply: he who cannot love cannot understand. — Tariq Ramadan

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. — Simone De Beauvoir

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, 'The 5th Wave,' explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us. — Rick Yancey

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes. — Tao Lin

Magrat woke up. And knew she wasn't a witch anymore. The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00. — Terry Pratchett

The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition. Sports were central to American students' lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans. — Amanda Ripley

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

When I first heard the word existential, I didn't know what it meant. But then I found out that no one knows what it means, so now I use it all the time. — Francine Pascal

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. — Osho

And desires are never here and now - they are non-existential. They are just mental, in the mind. And they cannot be fulfilled because their very nature is to move into the future. — Rajneesh

Existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. — Paul Kalanithi

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

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration ... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic. — Viktor E. Frankl

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds. — James Howard Kunstler

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, made a comment that sounds almost prophetic now: that the happy, primitive society (which, by the way, never existed) is lost for all those who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, Popper warns, the more certainly we will reach the Inquisition, the secret police, and a romanticized gangsterism. But once the existential problems of the individual, who is good by nature, can be blamed on the "evil" society, nothing stands in the way of sheer imagination. The definition of the benevolent society free of all power is only a question of fantasy. — Paul Watzlawick

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well. — Javier Marias

The accession of not one but three illegal drug users in a row to the US presidency constitutes an existential challenge to the prohibitionist regime. The fact that some of the most successful people of our time, be it in business, finances, politics, entertainment or the arts, are current or former substance users is a fundamental refutation of its premises and a stinging rebuttal of its rationale. A criminal law that is broken at least once by 50% of the adult population and that is broken on a regular basis by 20% of the same adult population is a broken law, a fatally flawed law. How can a democratic government justify a law that is consistently broken by a substantial minority of the population? What we are witnessing here is a massive case of civil disobedience not seen since alcohol prohibition in the 1930 in the US. On what basis can a democratic system justify the stigmatization and discrimination of a strong minority of as much as 20% of its population? — Jeffrey Dhywood

People use each other
as a healing for their pain. They put each other
on their existential wound,
on the eye, on the cunt, on mouth and open hand.
They hold each other and won't let go. — Yehuda Amichai

Using figure B, we can stipulate that an existential risk is equivalent to (i) all red-dot catastrophes, and (ii) any black-dot catastrophe that significantly compromises human well-being.* — Phil Torres

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

I'm a kindhearted but highly competitive pragmatist. When I seek to win something, I always make certain it's never at the expense of anything more serious than the inadequate efforts of others. — Jonathan Kieran

Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people for whom this existential space is important. — Pope Benedict XVI

Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it's not the same thing. Fear isn't the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential. — John Scalzi

I brought my first fall/winter line to New York, and it was confiscated by U.S. Customs. They asked, 'What is the value of this?' I said, 'I'm not so good with existential questions.' — John Malkovich

The whole world may say there is light and there is rainbow in the sky and the sun is rising,
but if my eyes are closed what does it mean to me?
The rainbows, the colors, the sunrise,
the whole thing is non-existential to me.
My eyes are closed, I am blind.
And if I listen to them too much,
and if I start believing in them too much,
and if I borrow their words and I also start talking about the rainbow that I have not seen,
about colors which I cannot see,
about the sunrise which is not my experience,
I may be lost in the forest of words. — Osho

Zen is not "attained" by mirror-wiping mediation, but by "self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now." We do not "come", we "are." Don't strive to become, but be. — Bruce Lee

We still have time to back out, I guess, if we want to. I don't see the karmic police coming to take us into existential custody, y'know? — David Berger

Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope. — Stephen Batchelor

Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation. — Marc Riboud

The self is who we truly are, but the persona or mask (the word comes from the Latin for an actor's mask) is the face we turn to the world in order to deal with it. A persona is absolutely necessary, but the problem is that we often become identified with it, to the detriment of our self, a dilemma that the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre recognized in his notion of mauvaise foi, or "bad faith," when one becomes associated exclusively with one's social role. — Gary Lachman