Quotes on Existential

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

All power is in essence power to deny mortality.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.

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.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning in life in a general way.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.

That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it... The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.

We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.

I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people for whom this existential space is important.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.