Existential Questions Quotes

Life is a great gift, and as we reach years of discretion, most of us naturally ask ourselves what should be the main object of our existence.

I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.

That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life

for some reason, dying men always ask the question they know the answer to. perhaps it's so they can die being right.

At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'

Do the atheists in Wisconsin realize they're going to Hell? Did you ask them that?

When I was in college, I majored in comparative religion because I really wanted to figure out if there was God and how I should live my life.

Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.

When you're dead, you don't breathe, you don't see, you don't feel, you don't love.

I don't think anyone flies into space without some form of fundamental introspection about what life is about.

Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

I was asking if unwinding kills you, or if it leaves you alive somehow. C'mon—it's not like we haven't thought about it." (...) What do you think, Connor?" asks Hayden. "What hap­pens to your soul when you get unwound?" Who says I even got one?" For the sake of argument, let's say you do." Who says I want an argument?

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The late F. W. H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but, on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn't exist, Elijah was God's invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay.

I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

AI makes philosophy honest

If we reject the Christian answer, we still have the problem. We're going to adopt some alternative, because the questions will not go away, the questions of, "What kind of person am I becoming?" and "What is my role in that?" and so on.

I am not particularly religious. But I think we do face the question of where God is, why we are created and where does life go, why we exist. That sort of thing. And it is very hard to talk about it these days, because it cannot be proven. It is hard to discuss it rationally.

We know so little of the why, what the universe is, what infinity is. The veil around us is very fragile.

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?

Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?