Top 75 Existential Quotes

I wouldn’t have been born if my parents had stayed in China. Which is kind of funny. But it also just kind of fills me with this existential dread.

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity’s nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

I think that every human – and this is something, you know, like, your years from 14 to, like, 23 are kind of, like, super, super existential, and you’re figuring out life.

I brought my first fall/winter line to New York, and it was confiscated by U.S. Customs. They asked, ‘What is the value of this?’ I said, ‘I’m not so good with existential questions.’

The story of our species is one of overcoming existential risk through new forms of cooperation and innovation.

Climate change is an existential threat to our economy, and ultimately to civilisation as we know it.

I have an existential crisis every time I walk into a bookshop, knowing that I’m not going to read all the books before I die.

The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be but hasn’t yet been resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word ‘resolved,’ if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis – there would be only despair.

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don’t have a clue how hard it is going to be.

Growth is essential and must be sustained. But rapid growth alone cannot address the problems arising out of continuing disparities. Tackling these is not just a matter of social justice but, more importantly, an existential necessity and a moral imperative.

At some point, I kind of went through this weird existential crisis in high school where I was just really depressed.

The real problem is not the existential threat of AI. Instead, it is in the development of ethical AI systems.

There was a time when people had the decency to wait until they were approaching 50 to have a mid-life crisis. Now it seems many thirtysomethings find themselves succumbing to existential navel-gazing.

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.

People in third-world countries are less eager to see movies full of angst over existential problems, and who can blame them. They’ve got other fish to fry. They’d rather see a few great dance routines and the guy end up with the girl.

ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It’s a serious problem overseas, but it’s confusing and frightening.

In my view, Obamacare is the most existential threat to our economy than anything we’ve ever had since the Great Depression, so I think a little bit of additional deficit is nothing compared to delaying if not repealing Obamacare.

When the movie ‘Sliding Doors’ came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, ‘Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I’d be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?’

I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.

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 lot of cops in fiction are very depressive and are kind of downbeat, and they’ve got all kinds of existential angst that they’re dealing with.

I never had an existential moment when I asked myself what I was going to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer, and I knew exactly the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.

If you can sit all generations of a family down and entertain them and, at the same time, leave them talking about existential notions, then that’s fantastic.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

I think it’s always interesting to make sensational stories where, if these people don’t make the right choice, it actually puts marks not just on their souls but also their bodies. That means that you can visualize existential questions.

Starting with the lyrics, ‘Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I’m a king, I’m the dirt, God within me shine,’ the first half of ‘6 Weeks’ delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media – of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we’ve already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We’re out of ‘affirmative actions’ of all kinds.

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it’s very limited in what it can do logically. It’s an existential experience – there and then gone.

We have an existential crisis, which is the climate crisis. Canada is one of the laggards in the industrialized world. Our record is terrible.

The argument that won the Brexit campaign is the one that said take back control… which is another way of saying we want to control our destinies again. This is an existential issue for the whole of Europe, not just for the U.K., because this sentiment is not limited to the United Kingdom.

I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

Around the world, climate change is an existential threat – but if we harness the opportunities inherent in addressing climate change, we can reap enormous economic benefits.

I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can’t answer it without crying. I think, You’re 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don’t know the answer yet.

I’m trying to use the language of today to express a general existential crisis that I think the world and I are going through.

Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.

My favorite movie is ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ with Clint Eastwood, a guy who gets his family killed by the bad guys then goes on a journey of revenge, eventually discovering himself – very existential.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art – just like sadness – were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

I’d say that the only trauma I’ve suffered was existential.

Humans should be the Earth’s custodians, not its butchers. Much attention – though not enough – focuses on the existential threat posed by climate change. But humanity’s mass destruction of the Earth’s wildlife is all too little discussed.

Iran may or may not be the existential threat to Israel that Netanyahu insists it is. But a lessening of U.S. support for Israel certainly would be. With an indifferent America, Israel would become a lonely, frightening place.

The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.

I haven’t written about an immigrant experience because I haven’t experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

I have existential worries inside of me, but I don’t always know how to express them all the time.

We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

There should be no doubt why Israel, our best friend and greatest ally in the Middle East, has determined that Iran poses an existential threat.

I’m more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It’s not a retail experience. It’s an existential one.

Try as I do to comprehend the human project and my part in it, I am further than ever from understanding the monstrous everyday things that seem like self-evident truths and existential necessities to so many.

Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.

One thing I’m super aware of in my music when I’m writing is: ‘Am I overcomplicating this?’ I’ll write a song about some deep existential quandary and explore all these dumb thought waves, and then think ‘Is it effective to say that? Or is it effective to say one simple thing that communicates the feeling better?’