The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
I had an existential crisis at the Oscars, sitting next to Sean Penn and Meryl Streep, and being like, 'What am I doing here? I don't belong here'. I felt like it could all be taken away.
Without awareness, we are not truly alive.
Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?
No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.
To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.
Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom!
My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife.
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.
A poverty learned with the humble, the poor, the sick and all those who are on the existential outskirts of life. A theoretical poverty is no use to us. Poverty is learned by touching the flesh of the poor Christ, in the humble, in the poor, in the sick and in children.
Love can exist only after meditation, not before it. That is a simple existential law. Before meditation - only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows.
The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.
There is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing.
I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.
The internet takes a lot of the anxiety of life away. It's a kind of deity. You're never lonely. You're always distracted. If you spend enough time on it, there's not really that nagging sensation of existential despair; it erases it very effectively. And it's monolithic. And thanks to it, we've got the ways to linger there after death - your blog exists afterwards, your e-mail exists afterwards.
. . . history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.
In every nowhere town there are somewhere dreams
(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i. e. , in an existential relation to life without intermission.
. . . 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.