Quotes about Existential

Being a Trump staffer had become an existential predicament: even if you wanted to get out, and almost all of them did, there was nowhere to go.

Everything about my own face that seemed to me familiar and obvious had vanished; what remained was a distinctive scattering of dots that symbolized the planets set against the celestial vault. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful.

The worst moment for the atheist is

When man can't find meaning in his life, he distracts himself with pleasure.

life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.

I doubt that, in this case, I was dealing with a neurotic condition at all, and that is why I thought that he did not need any psychotherapy, nor even logotherapy, for the simple reason that he was not actually a patient. [...] A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

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.

Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them; but the most human of all human needs—the need to see a meaning in one's life—remains unsatisfied. People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.

these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

At this moment, I feel as if the human race had no character at all — sought for nothing, believed in nothing, & fought only from a dreary sense of duty.

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.