Existential Concern Quotes

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be. It's wrong to say "everybody," but in literature I see it all the time - preoccupation with it, philosophical preoccupation, in fact. That's a principle element of literature and philosophy, often cited as the main element, the only real element. I say give it up.

Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

I really want to leave something behind that means something when I'm no longer here.

One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge […]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

It's not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather our concern must be to live while we're alive.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.