Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.
At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration.
Sometimes it has to do with other longings that are much more existential. Sometimes you go elsewhere not because you are not liking the one you are with; you are not liking the person you have become.
There was a time when people had the decency to wait until they were approaching 50 to have a mid-life crisis. Now it seems many thirtysomethings find themselves succumbing to existential navel-gazing.
My favorite movie is 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' with Clint Eastwood, a guy who gets his family killed by the bad guys then goes on a journey of revenge, eventually discovering himself - very existential.
Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.
'Atomic Blonde' is about the characters' bigger existential crisis and their world. It's not so much the conceit of the spy game; it's more that being a spy sucks. But we're going to make it fun to watch.
...intimacy being reduced to its content of mere sensation, will only be the misleading, obscure, and desperate alleviation of the existential disgust and anguish of him who has stumbled into a blind alley.
Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.
Try as I do to comprehend the human project and my part in it, I am further than ever from understanding the monstrous everyday things that seem like self-evident truths and existential necessities to so many.
Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.
I am afraid of abandonment, and, if you will, in a really existential way, being exposed as a fraud. Everyone's afraid of it, and I definitely am. This is a fear that motivates. Oh, and heights. And getting stabbed.
Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.
The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.
You might get run over; you might get hit by lightning. I mean, who knows? Each day, there is a chance you might die. And there's nothing wrong with that. Every living being on Earth is facing that same existential rift.
I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.
There was an existential moment - I don't know if I want to call it crisis - when I turned 50 and I felt 'this is interesting; how did this happen?' It affected me in a way I wasn't expecting. It made me pause for reflection.
There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.
Iran may or may not be the existential threat to Israel that Netanyahu insists it is. But a lessening of U.S. support for Israel certainly would be. With an indifferent America, Israel would become a lonely, frightening place.
About every year or two, there is a moment of truth where there's some new development in the marketplace, some new technology, some sort of existential crisis. You just have to be vigilant about looking out for those moments.
In my view, Obamacare is the most existential threat to our economy than anything we've ever had since the Great Depression, so I think a little bit of additional deficit is nothing compared to delaying if not repealing Obamacare.
The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.
That existential crisis is something you rarely see portrayed by black characters; the idea that people think about their own existence and that they have hopes and dreams is taken away from people of color in their representation.
The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.
I definitely have that bug; I'd really like to do some auteur, existential pieces, darker films, something that's really reflective of life. But I also love the genre of rom-coms, and I don't see myself completely detaching from that.
I'm in the middle of an existential crisis in how I approach comedy about these big issues. I sometimes find, when I get drawn on the subject of race, it's too close to home for me and I can't articulate what I'm trying to get across.
Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll.
People in third-world countries are less eager to see movies full of angst over existential problems, and who can blame them. They've got other fish to fry. They'd rather see a few great dance routines and the guy end up with the girl.
The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.
I think it's always interesting to make sensational stories where, if these people don't make the right choice, it actually puts marks not just on their souls but also their bodies. That means that you can visualize existential questions.
Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
Humans should be the Earth's custodians, not its butchers. Much attention - though not enough - focuses on the existential threat posed by climate change. But humanity's mass destruction of the Earth's wildlife is all too little discussed.
I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before.
This accumulated debt at all levels of our society poses an immediate existential threat to America. Now unlike the manufactured crises of global warming and healthcare, this is a true crisis. This crisis threatens the very sovereignty of our country.
The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn't yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word 'resolved,' if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis - there would be only despair.
You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?
Growth is essential and must be sustained. But rapid growth alone cannot address the problems arising out of continuing disparities. Tackling these is not just a matter of social justice but, more importantly, an existential necessity and a moral imperative.
Nothing is more untoward than a grown man tasking another with snapping a pic expressly so he can 'flex the 'fit.' It's tacky -self-aggrandizing - and speaks to an existential neediness typically reserved for failed actresses and phenomenally successful rappers.
When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.
What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, 'Stop climate change' is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we're in.
Yes, climate change is an existential threat, but there's also kind of this existential issue of why is it that as our society is progressing... things seem to be regressing and getting worse for a large number of people? Why is that happening? How do we fix that?
The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys.
The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.
I don't feel we need to be independent for me to feel confident in my Scottish identity. I think Scotland is pretty comfortable in its identity. We won't need independence to preserve it... if we don't become independent, it won't disappear; it isn't under existential threat.
Because I write what I feel the most heavy about. So if there is one day of the week when I feel completely crushed by existential dread, I'll end up writing about it, not the great day I had at the park with my friends. I hope it resonates with people - and it does, with some.
The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat.
When the movie 'Sliding Doors' came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, 'Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I'd be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?'
There's this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you're over-thinking the songwriting process. There's no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that's going to produce a better result, especially in the arts.
I think 'The Searcher' is a departure from my first because it's less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main character is actually the central mystery, and his journey is all about trying to figure himself out.
[Jean-Paul] Sartre was a throwback to the existential period. I'm not really so much into that these days. I went through a period of going over things and looking at them again to see what they were. But I'm into psychiatry type things. I'm into philosophy. I'm into that sort of thing.