Existential Problem Quotes

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love."

We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.

Our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but ... it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it ... I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.

Man is the only animal who does not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem that he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature, and he does not know where he will arrive if he goes forward. Man's existential contradiction results in a state of constant disequilibrium. This disequilibrium distinguishes him from the animal, which lives, as it were, in harmony with nature.

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours