existential concerns Quotes

There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.

I've never planned ahead.I just sort of go through life checking the menu of three meals that day. I never worry about tomorrow. It's only since I've gotten older that I've begun to wonder about time running out. Is it sufficient unto itself that I don't plan? Because maybe next Thursday won't come one day. And then, I'm concerned about that. But that's not uniquely the writer's concern, that's the concern of every middle-aged man who looks in the mirror.

I'm possibly a very morbid person but I think about death a lot.

I've learned to accept birth and death . . . but sometimes I still worry about what lies between.

All of the things I used to obsess over, I'm no longer as obsessed with. I have new concerns but they're a little more existential or cosmic.

I don't think having a fear of death is unreasonable.

Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology .

Our soul is governed by four invisible forces: love, death, power and time.

If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

The idea of feeling old is much more the worry of a slightly younger person. When you are getting old, that becomes - psssh - completely secondary to the absolute understanding of how short your life is.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles.

Man has wants deeper than can be supplied by wealth or nature or domestic affections. His great relations are to his God and to eternity.

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.

What I ask of [the writer] is not to ignore the reality and the fundamental problems that exist. The world's hunger, the atomic threat, the alienation of man, I am astonished that they do not color all our literature.

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Worry about staying alive first. Then worry about how you're going to live.

Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

For me, even when I was pregnant, I wondered, Should we even have children if we're bringing them into this horrible, scary world? But I did have a child, despite these fears - or because of them - and these fears are both contemporary and as old as time.

It's totally appropriate to be anxious about the future of things you care about, especially in a shifting world. But I've every expectation that literature will continue to exist.

Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.