Top 1200 Existential Crisis Quotes & Sayings - Page 7

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

I sometimes look into the face of my dog Stan and see a wistful sadness and existential angst, when all he is actually doing is slowly scanning the ceiling for flies.

It's not a mid-life crisis. It's a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up with everything and you go "I have everything but I'm still unhappy."

We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

Oh. No wonder I'd been sick. I hadn't eaten anything since then. I'm a girl who likes her meals, so it hadn't been a weight-loss tactic. I'd just been too busy bumping from crisis to crisis. Go on the Sookie Stackhouse Narrow Avoidance of Death Diet! Run for your life, and miss meals, too! Exercise plus starvation.

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.

We are facing an enormous crisis in Africa right now in terms of illegal wildlife trafficking, which is decimating animal populations, destroying local economies, and funding armed insurgencies and terrorist syndicates. If we do not find solutions to this crisis now, there will be little habitat left beyond sparse areas of national parks that will serve as glorified zoos to small pockets of remaining animals.

Most people give Kennedy a passing grade, a good grade on the Cuban Missile Crisis handling, but what they don't realize, if he had had strength, if he had showed strength before, there would never have been a Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance.

Mark my words.It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

I don't believe the United States is going through a midlife crisis. The United States is going through an adolescent crisis.

I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

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.'

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

A test of a Christian's character is what he does after he comes to the blockade in the road and what his attitude is after everything has left him except Jesus. You will never know down here that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have left. You will never be able to tell the world for sure that He will do in a crisis unless you learn how to live in a crisis.

I'm really interested in how people face existential crises and either overcome them or don't, and in how the human psyche responds.

The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.

Sometimes we don't face what's going on in our world, be it a water crisis or an earth crisis, because it's a little too scary and painful. Just like we don't want to face the parts of ourselves that are a little too uncomfortable or painful. We've gotta face both and love both so that we can heal both.

The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That is, historical capitalism is in crisis precisely because, in pursuing the endless accumulation of capital, it is beginning to approximate that state of being Adam Smith asserted was 'natural' to man but which has never historically existed. The 'propensity [of humanity] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another' has entered into domains and zones previously untouched, and the pressure to expand commodification is relatively unchecked.

Obviously, our most pressing need is subsistence for the most vulnerable victims of Katrina, but we should not overlook the fact that the victims of Katrina also include middle-class Americans who have saved and invested, but now face an economic crisis, .. They should be able to tap into their savings and meet this crisis without facing an unfair penalty.

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.

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

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.

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

I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget. Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and existential worth, but not when you're three feet tall.

I reject the idea that there is some sort of existential "clash of civilizations." I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods.

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.

A related recurring theme is the exploration of how we take for granted the things in our immediate environment that are common and ordinary. Existential blindness, of sorts.

Sometimes when I perform, and it's obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

I can't imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all.

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

Your culture demands that you bring some kind of crisis to your work and therefore you can not bring any unity to it. In order to bring crisis into your work you have to bring it to a state of expectancy. In other words you have to leave your work in the state of mind of being a question.

The real problem is not the existential threat of AI. Instead, it is in the development of ethical AI systems.

So many companies today, when first confronted by a crisis, go into a bunker mentality. They either say, "No comment," or they lie as a knee-jerk reaction. Neither of these sins, I believe, is generally committed on purpose. Rather, companies often panic when first confronted with a crisis and either say nothing, which looks like they're covering something up, or they speak what they wish was the truth.

When Cuba lost their fossil fuel pipeline when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Overnight they had no choice, they had to transition to clean energy, they didn't have any fuel to burn, and they also had to transition to a healthy food system, an organic system - their economy is crashing, this was not a planned transition. This was a crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, in which pollution went away. And it's very instructive to see what happened to their health.

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

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.

ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It's a serious problem overseas, but it's confusing and frightening.

There should be no doubt why Israel, our best friend and greatest ally in the Middle East, has determined that Iran poses an existential threat.

One doesn't do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

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

I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

Democrats and Republicans love Israel and all of us care about the existential threat to Israel from Iran.

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

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

It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.

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.

So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 - a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe.

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

Ways to be actively involved in the solution: 1. Consider adoption. 2. Be a regular giver of your money to Crisis Pregnancy Centers. 3. Volunteer in a Crisis Pregnancy Center. 4. Be involved in spreading truth with good literature. 5. Make your presence know at the abortion clinics in town (by) writing or phoning or visiting and talking, if you can, with those who work there. 6. Dream a new kind of ministry. 7. Pray!

Start a 'Stop Doing' list. I'll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list