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Existential Angst Quotes

Browse 43 quotes about Existential Angst.

Existential Angst Quotes

“Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story.”

FearHuman NatureFear Of DeathExperiencesFreedom Of ThoughtEscapismExistential CrisisExistential AngstEscape From RealityPersonal Accountability
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“We come from this earth and we will return to this earth. The word human is a derivative of the word humus. We spring from the same soil that houses our ancestor’s great sleep. We walk on the fossilized bones and decomposed flesh of all the people and every species that traversed the earth before our time. It is humbling and reassuring to know that I entered this life-giving sphere only after so many good people came before me to consecrate this land with their vitality and knowing that we share the universal story of struggle. It is consoling understanding that after I die Mother Earth will turn my decomposed shell into a new form of life. My decaying body will provide nutrients for life that will rise after I die. Until the soil opens up to receive me as its own child, I must take a stand and make the most out of the sunshine and rainstorms that beat down upon all people alike.”

StruggleLife And LivingExistentialismLife And DeathExistential CrisisExistence QuotesExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.”

SufferingExistenceCrimeStressTraumaBetrayalAgonyAnguishHumiliationDiscouragementDepravityTraumatic ExperiencesEnlightenment PrinciplesBetrayal QuotesSuffering QuoteSuffering Of HumanityExistential AngstSuffering LifeDejectionAgony Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“I’m about to begin halfway saying that— —that she was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. If she were an expressive creature she would say: the world is outside me, I am outside me.”

LonelinessIdentityMelancholyIntrospectionAlienationBleakPsychological FictionAbsurdismExistential AngstFeminist Literature
Book:The Hour of the Star
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“Stored personal memories along with handed down collective memories of stories, legends, and history allows us to collate our interactions with a physical and social world and develop a personal code of survival. In essence, we all become self-styled sages, creating our own book of wisdom based upon our studied observations and practical knowledge gleaned from living and learning. What we quickly discover is that no textbook exist how to conduct our life, because the world has yet to produce a perfect person – an ideal observer – whom is capable of handing down a concrete exemplar of epistemic virtues. We each draw upon the guiding knowledge, theories, and advice available for us in order to explore the paradoxes, ironies, inconsistencies, and the absurdities encountered while living in a supernatural world. We mold our personal collection of information into a practical practicum how to live and die. Each day we define and redefine who we are, determine how we will react today, and chart our quest into an uncertain future.”

StoriesWisdomTruthLife LessonsMemoriesHistoryIdentityWisdom QuotesSelf AwarenessHistoricalMemorySelf RealizationStorytellingLegacyUncertaintyPhilosophy Of LifeLife Lessons QuotesMeaning Of LifeExistentialismPurpose Of LifeLegendsSelf DeterminationTruth Of LifeSelf KnowledgeSelf DevelopmentMeaningful LifePurpose Driven LifePurposeful LivingKnow ThyselfSelf IdentityMemories QuotesLegacy QuotesSelf KnowingPersonal HistoryMeaningfulnessPurposefulSage AdviceExistential AngstMemory QuotesHistorical NovelUncertainties In LifeCode Of ConductSagesPersonal Observation
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“We can combat existential anguish – the unbearable lightness of our being – in a variety of ways. We can choose to work, play, destroy, or create. We can allow a variety of cultural factors or other people to define who we are, or we can create a self-definition. We decide what to monitor in the environment. We regulate how much attention we pay to nature, other people, or the self. We can watch and comment upon current cultural events and worldly happenings or withdraw and ignore the external world. We can drink alcohol, dabble with recreational drugs, play videogames, or watch television, films, and sporting events. We can travel, go on nature walks, camp, fish, and hunt, climb mountains, or take whitewater-rafting trips. We can build, paint, sing, create music, write poetry, or read and write books. We can cook, barbeque, eat fine cuisine at restaurants or go on fasts. We can attend church services, worship and pray, or chose to embrace agnosticism or atheism. We can belong to charitable organizations or political parties. We can actively or passively support or oppose social and ecological causes. We can share time with family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances or live alone and eschew social intermixing.”

PlayWorkSolitudeSelf DeterminationCreateLiving Life To The FullestExistential AngstSolitude As A ChoicePhilosphy Of Life
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“I seek to use the tools of the mind to overcome a narcissistic self and attain self-mastery. I aspire to engage in self-cultivation by making practical usage of the process of enduring privations, overcoming challenges, and rejecting illicit temptations in order to gain fortitude, courage, and wisdom. I shall reflect upon grievous personal mistakes and embrace the concept of repentance as a lifelong growth process through which humankind conscientiously learns to make better choices by forsaking vice, immorality, and wickedness. I must also unreservedly embrace fate by perceiving everything that happens in life including suffering and loss as good, and affirm a life filled with indignity, sorrow, and tragedy. I can only discover happiness – a meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value of existence – by living with dignity in the face of absurdity. When we affirm all aspects of being, we enjoy a tranquil existence.”

Philosophy Of LifeSelf AcceptanceExistentialTranquilityExistential AngstSelf AffirmationDignity QuotesAffirmation And AttitudeAffirmation Quotes
Author:Kilroy J. Oldster
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“I couldn't bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us - the haranguing mothers and sexless fathers - I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.”

HumorParentingParentsParenthoodDreadDisneyExistential CrisisMidlife CrisisExistential AngstDisney World
Book:Fleishman Is in Trouble
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“Every form of life must struggle. Life is an aberration; death is ordinary. Life requires obstruction, conflict, reverses, and resolve. Life requires questing. Questing provides the meaning that we seek, a purpose to justify the inevitable struggle to live knowing the absurdity that we must die.”

StruggleFailureConflictAdversitySeekingLife And DeathResolveMeaningful LifeAdversity QuotesFailure QuotesJourney Of LifePurposeful LivingQuestResoluteConflictsSetbacksPurposeful LifeStrugglingMeaningfulnessExistential AngstStruggle For LifePurposeful JourneyQuesting
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Our reward for surviving the hard knocks of a corporal life is arguably paltry. The inevitability of the big sleep is our final reward for laying it all on the line each day that we still breathe. A person whom elects to transform him or herself does so because they believe that life is worthwhile. If a troubled person mints a newly reconstituted persona, it might enable them serenely to accept everything life calls for, even struggle, loss, defeat, disintegration, and death.”

Philosophy Of LifeMeaning Of LifeLife And DeathPurpose Of LifeJourney Of LifePurposeful LivingEnlightened OneExistential CrisisExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“The real universe is just that black. The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It's the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. But in this dark forest, there's a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing beside it shouting, 'Here I am! Here I am!”

ForestExistential AngstCosmic HorrorEldritch LocationFermi Paradox
Book:The Dark Forest
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“He thought about the loss of humanity that was eating away at the world and the loss of the connection to the self that ate away at the consciousness which animated all into being. He thought about how the collective psyche was teetering on that knife’s edge between a desperation to live and a desperation to die. And here he was at the cusp of it himself.”

ConsciousnessExistentialismExistentialExistential CrisisExistential AngstStruggle QuotesExistential PhilosophyStruggle Of ExistenceDesperation QuotesBeing Quotes
Book:The Subtle Cause
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“Humans recognize the duality, autonomy, and latitude range of the mind and the body, and all humans comprehend their impending mortality. Unlike other animals, humankind knows despair brought about by understanding the inevitability of death of all living creatures. The radius of human thought touching upon the longitude of our transient existence causes infinite pain. Seeking to ameliorate existential anguish incites us to ponder spiritual matters, and this sphere of mental activity spurs us to contemplate the perimeter of unknown frontiers. Our ability to understand the compass of life and death allows us to view the circumference of the world as consisting of a past, a present, and a future in relation to our own lives. How a person views the range of their earthly life and how a person rationalizes their march towards a deathly outback creates a system of beliefs that separate people into classes, and the variations amongst class members’ belief systems supplements who we think we are.”

PastSpiritualDeathSpiritualityIdentitySpiritual QuotesPhilosophy Of LifeLife And DeathSpiritual GrowthMortalityAnguishMind And BodyDeath QuotesSpiritual DevelopmentPast And PresentSelf IdentityPast And FutureDeath QuotationsPersonal BeliefsExistential AngstDispairMortality Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“The powerful questions of life produce a dynamic dualism, which interplay creates the operatic structure that we must operate. Can the flesh and spirit coexist? Can inner despair and renewed optimism reside under the same roof? Can we harness humankind’s wretchedness in order to broker its salvation? Should all people seek out perfection or work to accept their fallibility? Should I eschew pain or embrace suffering? Do I cave into the meaningless of my life or actively rebel against the patent absurdity of human existence?”

Meaning Of LifeExistentialismPurpose Of LifeExistentialExistential CrisisExistential AngstSelf QuestioningLife QuestionsExistential AnguishQuestions Of Life
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“No importa tanto la diferenciación entre el progreso representado por el ahorro de energía (que simplifica la vida cotidiana) o por la expansión de energía (que potencia nuestras aspiraciones o "aficiones" naturales), sino el acento puesto en la excesiva velocidad con que estas transformaciones han afectado al Japón, como consecuencia de la procedencia externa de los estímulos que, al no ser fruto de una secuencia generado intrínsecamente, ha obligado a una apresurada (y por ello superficial) asimilación de los cambios (muchos en muy poco tiempo), lo cual ha llegado a provocar una auténtica "angustia existencial.”

EnergyJapanIndividualismModernityIdentity CrisisExistential CrisisExistential AngstMeiji
Book:My Individualism & The Philosophical Foundations of Literature
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“Whereas a belief in an absurd world arises out of the fundamental disharmony of a person searching for meaning in an apparently meaninglessness universe, an existential nihilist displays impassive intellectual stoicism towards their eventual mortality while embracing a passionate artistic commitment to munity against the underlying syndrome of insignificance and confusion encasing life.”

StoicismNihilismStoicExistentialistNihilistExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.”

MemoirWriters On WritingNihilismWriters QuotesMemoir WritingPersonal EssaysEssayistExistentialistNihilistExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“A desire to attain short-term happiness while laboring under the weight a looming death sentence is an obvious paradox. Suicide, as distinguished from medical euthanasia, is an emotional reaction to the absurdity of life. Suicide is a panic-stricken reflex induced by the sinister twins of fear and foreboding. A rational person does not commit self-murder because their longing for happiness is incongruent with their present day reality. Suicide is a superficial response to hard times; suicide is a pusillanimous solution. A more measured reaction and, therefore, ultimately a braver and logical tactic is to meet life’s pillbox of irrationality headfirst. Upon soul-searching reflection, a thinking person accepts that while he or she might never comprehend a unifying meaning of life they still prefer to experience each permitted day of life to the fullest. A pragmatic person accepts the cold fact that happiness is fleeting and death is inevitable. By acknowledging and accepting the underlying absurdity of life, the prisoner awakens to discover his own humanity. By refusing to cooperate with death, by working each day to expand personal consciousness, by savoring each moment of life regardless of its hazards, adversities, misfortunes, and seemingly lack of overriding purpose, an impertinent ward of time transcends his or her incarnate incarceration.”

SuicideExistentialismAbsurdityNihilismExistential CrisisExistential AngstNihilisticExistential Anguish
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“I cannot shun the past because it contains information that is useful to script future goals. Looking back into the opaque window of reductive retrospect, what essential opportunities exist today that beckon one to seek with unrestrained enthusiasm? What iridescent signals flare from our conceptual self that if we heedlessly ignore their luminous summons, such deliberate acts of omission will suture the apex of our souls, relegating us to the dreaded curse of mucking along in an ordinary life stalled out by our overweening fear of estrangement?”

PastLife LessonsExistentialismLearning From MistakesPastimeExistential CrisisExistential AngstLearning From The PastLearning From AdversityExistential Anguish
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“College students’ bizarre actions are incomprehensible until scrutinized under the lens that they are simply defying their mortality. A person learns how to live by contemplating death, because when a person faces death, it strips everything superfluous away, revealing the sterling qualities of life. University students newly freed from parental restraints desire to ascertain the essence of their life, but they lack the maturity and life experiences meaningfully to contemplate the weighty subjects of life and death. Realizing their immaturity and resultant angst, collegiate students act recklessly in order to loudly proclaim that they do not care if fate demands that they die will, when in fact they are terrified of both living and dying.”

StudentsCollegeMortalityExistentialCollege StudentsExistential AngstLiving And DyingExistential Anguish
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Am I alone in an ensconced inner world where I obsessively worry about what happens to me, where the story of personal survival becomes the central theme of my shallow existence? I think not. Swaddled in our own brand of strangeness, we all struggle to come to terms with our demonstrated personal shortcomings. Our yearned-for life of living in pink skyways far removed from harm’s way is depressingly marked in contrast by our actual crabby existence spent scuttling along akin to a smug lobster, scrunched down on the asphalt streets, working in the city grid as frumpy members of the faceless mob.”

Meaning Of LifeAlienationExistential CrisisExistentialistExistential AngstMeaningful LivingExistential AnguishExistential QuestionsExistential Alienation
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“A person whom questions the purpose behind enduring life strafed with pain and self-doubt must construct a self-rescue plan. Does a demoralized person discover contentment and a meaningful life through expanded intellectual studies or by becoming engrossed in living deeply connected to nature? Should I seek personal conquest and eradication of ugly segments of my persona or merger and unification of the irrational splinters of a fragmented and traumatized personality? How does a person express what it means to be human? How does a person locate the incandescent flash of their flesh? If I shout into the wind with all my might, will responsive people hear my wild cry? Will placing pen to paper buffet the cantos of a troubled mind, expose the operatic musings of a madman’s ranting song, or will looking at each day through the diverse lens of both detachment and solipsism ignite an illuminating shaft of wisdom to grace the sinkhole of a fallen man?”

Meaningful LifeSelf DoubtExistential CrisisExistential AngstMeaningful LivingLife QuestionsMadmanExistential AnguishExistential Questions
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“The gyrfalcon Dan flew that day was a bird of the year who was just learning to hunt. When he brought her out, I shook my head at the size of her. She was massive; Dan had aptly named her Jabba the Hut. As with all falcons, female gyrfalcons are a third larger than the males. ... She thought that she was a person and treated Dan as her mate.This gave new meaning to the term "henpecked.”

NatureIdentityMigrationExistential AngstBirds Of PreyFalcons
Book:The Rites of Autumn
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“When I talk about the pain and hardship of a scientist's life, I'm speaking of more than existential angst. Galileo's work was condemned by the Church; Madame Curie paid with her life, a victim of leukemia wrought by radiation poisoning. Too many of us develop cataracts. None of us gets enough sleep. Most of what we know about the universe we know thanks to a lot of guys (and ladies) who stayed up late at night.”

KnowsEnoughPainNightGuyUniverseChurchSleepLateScientistPaidVictimThanksHardshipRadiationExistentialAngstPoisoningLeukemiaExistential AngstEnough SleepMadame Curie
Book:The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?
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“I seem to have come out of the womb with existential angst and wasn't a happy kid, so I've been on a lifelong search trying to discover how to live the best life possible. I committed my life to doing what I could to experience greater happiness, which ultimately led me to write a book on the subject called Happy for No Reason.”

WritingTryingBookReasonSeemsKidsGreaterSubjectsCommittedNo ReasonExistentialWombLifelongAngstExistential AngstHappy Kid
Author:Marci Shimoff
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“I think that the thing is, all those years of creating music or trying to express something of a dark shadow, an existential angst that I have felt most of my life and still feel today, to not be overwhelmed by it. Music, in a way, is a great vehicle, a means by which one can express all these somewhat contradictory feelings.”

ThinkingWayFeelsTryingYearsMeanStillsFeelingsTodayFeltDarkCreatingShadowVehicleExistentialOverwhelmedContradictoryAngstExistential AngstCreating Music
Author:Annie Lennox
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“First, you hand over some basics-overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliché, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.”

WorldLoveNeedsGivingFirstsWellsHandsAgeJoyDesireTalkingVirtueReturnPromiseSafeNormalUnderstoodEndureAverageBarsWeatherEtcOverwhelmingExistentialModestSoapAngstBasicsRebornBondingGiving InExistential AngstWell ManneredEnduring Love
Author:Julianna Baggott
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