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Existential Quotes

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Existential Quotes

“You earth, you soil, you chewing monster of human hearts in casseroles...”

DeathNatureLossAngerMourningProtestExistentialSurrealism
Book:SONG FOR YOU / CÂNTEC PENTRU TINE (Bilingual English–Romanian Edition / Ediție bilingvă engleză–română / 2025): Poems of Love, Madness & Resurrection / ... nebunie și renaștere
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“She could have shot herself, scratched herself, or indulged in other forms of self mutilation, but she chose what she probably felt was the weakest option-to at least endure the discomfort of the weather." "The minutes were cruel. Hours were punishing. Standing above him at all moments of awakeness was the hand of time, and it didn't hesitate to wring him out. It smiled and squeezed and let him live. What great malice there could be in allowing someone to live." "And I stop listening to me, because to put it bluntly, i tire me. When I start thinking like that, I become so exhausted, and I don't have the luxury of indulging fatigue. I am compelled to continue on, because although it's not true for every person on earth, it's true for the vast majority-that death waits for no man-and if he does, he doesn't usually wait very long." "Please believe me when I say I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.”

BeautifulDeathExistential
Book:The Book Thief
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“Imagine the universe is like this cloth.” Philippos said, lifting up an old rag off the ground. “There are thousands of tiny threads woven in tiny, little patterns. If you follow one thread it will lead you to the end, but also you’ll see that more threads are connected to it. What if you decide to follow another? Where would that lead you? And if you cut one thread, what would happen to the cloth then? Would it fray until it fell apart? Or would it just change pattern?” he paused thoughtfully. “Wielders like you can see those possibilities. You can follow the threads and see where they begin and end, where and how they connect with everything else and what might happen if something changes along the way.”

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Book:Wielding Crimson
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“My life feels like a dream that has already ended. There's nothing to fear and nothing to rejoice about. I should feel happy, but instead, I feel nothing. Lately, I experience a profound sense of emptiness. This void is unmistakable, even when I try to convince myself otherwise. It is beautiful, boundless, full yet empty. Now I've come to understand what people mean about memories—whether they are good or bad, they always leave you feeling a bit more empty afterward. After an ending, there's just a long stretch of time where it seems everything has concluded and nothing new will ever begin. Maybe there is no path back to a lost paradise.”

MemoriesLongingNostalgiaEmptinessMelancholyVoidExistentialIntrospectionParadise LostDreamlike
Author:Rolf van der Wind
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“There is a thing that happens with children: If no one is watching them, nothing is really happening to them. It is not some philosophical conundrum like the one about the tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it: that is a puzzler for college freshman. No. If you are very small, you actually understand that there is no point in jumping into the swimming pool unless they see you do it. The child crying, ‘‘Watch me, watch me,’’ is not begging for attention; he is pleading for existence itself.”

ChildrenPhilosophyExistenceAttentionPsychologyPhilosophicalExistentialismChildExistential
Book:Saying Goodbye: A Memoir for Two Fathers
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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 always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)”

ExistencePsychologySelf EsteemExistentialRemembrance
Book:Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
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“ကိုယ့်အတ္တနဲ့ကိုယ် တစ်ကိုယ်ကောင်းဆန်ပစ်လိုက်ရတဲ့ သူစိမ်းတစ်ယောက်ရဲ့ နေထိုင်မှုပုံဆံလိုမျိုးပေါ့။ အဝေးဆုံးကို ထွက်သွားခွင့်မရှိတဲ့ သူတစ်ယောက်မို့ အားလုံးရဲ့ အနီးနားမှာပဲ ကိုယ်ဟာ ပျောက်ကွယ်သွားအောင် တိတ်ဆိတ်နေခဲ့လိုက်တာ။”

SolitudeExistential
Book:လူတွေ၊ လမ်းတွေ၊ အလုပ်အကိုင်တွေနဲ့ ပတ်သက်ရာပတ်သက်ကြောင်းတွေ
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“These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth and honesty, they are entangled in a web of misunderstandings. And despite their keen desire, they cannot prevent a fog of false opinions, of accommodation, of halfway concessions, of indulgent silence, of erroneous interpretation from settling on everything they do. And so a cloud of melancholy gathers around their brow, for such natures hate the necessity of appearances more than death, and their persistent bitterness about this makes them volatile and menacing. From time to time they take revenge for their violent selfconcealment, for their coerced constraint. They emerge from their caves with horrible expressions on their faces; at such times their words and deeds are explosions, and it is even possible for them to destroy themselves.”

PhilosophyQuotesLonelinessSolitudeExistentialFriedrich NietzscheUnfashionable Observations
Book:Untimely Meditations
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“C10 (or the king's carolers – from student times) on the side stairway, we gather in the evening, many the cold cement steps welcome us as if we were the king's carolers we have mulled wine and dry snacks the orange guitar stretches and warps in the candlelight we take another drag from the cigarette, nibble on sticks and salty biscuits happiness pricks our veins with Burmese nails One floor below, behind the door 'Mr. Blues - Don't Disturb' the tasty rot of jazz caresses our toes We sin in thought, our minds dangling from the railing later, the Serbs come to sing with us Golden-haired like gods from a bombed country we scratch the wall with our nails, don’t know what to say they bring us wafers with fruits and chocolate wrapped in green foil the second evening we gather again on the side stairway with the same mulled wine and dry snacks and the same us the old rockers hanging heavy on the guitar’s body at the midnight office.”

MemoriesPoemGuitarPoetry QuotesExistentialIntrospectionBohemianReflectiveExpressionismRomanian Author
Book:Orbul de la Cină
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“Life decisions—making too many and/or making them too easily is as dangerous as not making them at all. How clearly mania and depression outline the extremes of the dilemma of us all before the terrible fact of choice: indecisiveness in depression—nothing can be done; overdecisiveness in mania—everything is to be done and nothing gets done. We are doomed to choose, Sartre said, yet we don’t know when to choose and when not to choose.”

DepressionDecisionsChoiceExistentialPsychiatryManiaSartre
Book:The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness
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“There, at the very edge, bordering on the collapse of reality and the dawn of oblivion, an uncanny stillness pins me down to my bed. The world beyond my eyelids, unsteady under a convulsing sky, swings in rhythm with my faltering movements, shifting from pulse to pause, to pulse, to pause.”

DreamConsciousnessEmotionsPsychologicalContemplationExistentialIntrospectionSurrealPsychological FictionPerception And Reality
Book:We Are Everyone
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“Thou Shalt Kill by Stewart Stafford Today, an official declaration: "The past's forbidden soil is virgin; The present, a thunderous chariot, To glory's gold destiny awaiting us. Go forth and offer up sacrifices!" But the blood we spilt was red, Whichever body it spurted from. Pleas for help, fused into one. Witnesses to death grew jaded. We made the living into the dead, Forged museums of crowded streets, In executioners' hoods at limp dawn. Arising afresh to our deliverance. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”

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Author:Stewart Stafford
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“She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.' 'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”

LoveHappinessEmotionsExistential
Book:The Rum Diary
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“The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”

PsychologyExistential
Book:Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych
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“How do text messages make you feel existential? I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.”

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Book:Never Always Sometimes
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