Existential Questions Quotes

“The day we are jettisoned back to the spring of our lives can be disorienting and emotionally challenging. By navigating the transformational milestones, a mental spark can discharge a fulguration in our memory and provoke confusion of existential questions about the nature of our identity, personal growth, and time perception. (“Paper Boats Forever »)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. I feel my lifeblood draining away in an oily spigot of inner turmoil. Questions abound and personal survival hinges upon sorting through possible solutions and selecting the most fitting answers. Is my pain real or simply an illusion of a frustrated ego? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? I aspire to discover a means to live in congruence with the trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. Can I discover a noble path that frees me from the shallowness of decadent physical and emotional desires? Can I surrender any desire to seek fame and fortune? Can I terminate a craving to punish other persons for their perceived wrongs? Can I recognize that forgiving persons whom offended me is a self-initiated, transformative act? Can I conquer an irrational fear of the future? Can I accept the inevitable chaos that accompanies life? Can I find a means to achieve inner harmony by steadfastly resolving to live in the moment free of angst? Can I purge egotisms that mar an equitable perception of life by renunciation of the self and all worldly endeavors? Can I live a harmonious existence devoid the panache of vanities?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It’s like a man in the trenches
again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because
if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just
the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has
admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just
his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d
slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“The question is: why can’t parking lots be modest paradises?”
― Eran Ben-Joseph

“What is evil?' asked the Fiend”
― Joseph Delaney, I Am Grimalkin

“The Existentially Preoccupied Long Distance Runner

Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long
with each mile I can feel the pain of my own awareness,
my own heightened consciousness of what ails me,
the ills of the world,
the limitations of our existence,
the losses we must endure,
the superficial interactions.

Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long
that I can feel all of these feelings seep out of the pours of my own skin,
the sweat cleansing my very being,
my awareness of beauty heightened,
the experience of joy possible,
each mile, each minute, ridding me of these feelings,
washing away the illusions,
showing me the truth.

Sometimes I like to run so hard and for so long…
until finally I feel free…
until finally I AM free…”
― Jacqueline Simon Gunn

“What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?
There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was:
“You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was also dreadful.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Am I alone in an ensconced inner world where I obsessively worry about what happens to me, where the story of personal survival becomes the central theme of my shallow existence? I think not. Swaddled in our own brand of strangeness, we all struggle to come to terms with our demonstrated personal shortcomings. Our yearned-for life of living in pink skyways far removed from harm’s way is depressingly marked in contrast by our actual crabby existence spent scuttling along akin to a smug lobster, scrunched down on the asphalt streets, working in the city grid as frumpy members of the faceless mob.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A person whom questions the purpose behind enduring life strafed with pain and self-doubt must construct a self-rescue plan. Does a demoralized person discover contentment and a meaningful life through expanded intellectual studies or by becoming engrossed in living deeply connected to nature? Should I seek personal conquest and eradication of ugly segments of my persona or merger and unification of the irrational splinters of a fragmented and traumatized personality? How does a person express what it means to be human? How does a person locate the incandescent flash of their flesh? If I shout into the wind with all my might, will responsive people hear my wild cry? Will placing pen to paper buffet the cantos of a troubled mind, expose the operatic musings of a madman’s ranting song, or will looking at each day through the diverse lens of both detachment and solipsism ignite an illuminating shaft of wisdom to grace the sinkhole of a fallen man?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“COULD WE HAVE LIVED OUR lives ignoring politics? The Occupation determined the crops that the fallah planted, it stood in the face of every industrial project, it prevented us from establishing our own financial institutions, it hampered our wishes for education, it censored what could be published, it deprived us of a voice in the Ottoman parliament, it dictated what jobs our men could hold and it held back the emancipation of our women. It put each one of us in the position of a minor and forbade us to grow up. And with every year that passed we saw our place in the train of modern nations receding, the distance we would have to make up growing ever longer and more difficult. It sowed distrust among our people and pushed the best among them either to fanatical actions or to despair. And in Palestine we saw a clear warning of what the colonialist project could finally do: it could take the land itself from under its inhabitants.
Could we have ignored all this? And what space would have been left for our lives to occupy? And what man with any dignity would have consented to confine himself to that space and not tried to push at its boundaries? And what woman would not have seen it as her duty to help him?”
― Ahdaf Soueif

“Each person must implement their preferred problem solving method to address existential questions pertaining to life and death, living and loving, working and playing, resting and restructuring.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“There are innumerable unanswerable questions that plague humankind. It is permissible to accept the unknown and unknowable as establishing the outer limits of human possibilities. Unanswerable questions – questions with no provable correct answers – describe the boundaries of human existence. All we know for sure is that everything that is alive will die.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“Mržnja prema životu, prijezir prema životu - makar ih osjećali zbog istinske boli koju život nanosi - od toga život postaje samo još gori, nepodnošljivo gori. U tome nema istinskoga protesta, nema ničeg dobrog, samo želja da se stvori patnja patnje radi. To je sama bit zla. Ljude koji počnu tako razmišljati samo jedan korak dijeli od potpuna pustošenja. Ponekad samo nemaju potrebna sredstva, a ponekad, kao Staljin, drže prst na gumbu za aktivaciju nuklearne bombe.
No s obzirom na tako očite užase egzistencije, zar zbilja ne postoji nikakva smislena alternativa? Može li samo Biće, sa svojim komarcima malaričarima, djecom vojnicima i degenerativnim neurološkim bolestima uistinu biti opravdano? Nisam siguran bih li i u devetnaestomu stoljeću mogao odgovoriti na to pitanje prije nego što su milijuni ljudi iskusili monstruozne totalitarne užase dvadesetoga stoljeća. Ne znam je li moguće razumjeti zašto su takve sumnje moralne nedopustive čak i bez holokausta., Staljinovih čistki i Maova katastrofalnoga ''Velikoga skoka naprijed''. Mislim i da na to pitanje nije moguće odgovoriti razmišljanjem. Razmišljanje neizbježno vodi u ponor. Tolstoju nije pomoglo. Možda nije pomoglo ni Nietzscheu za kojega bismo mogli reći da je o tim stvarima razmišljao jasnije od bilo koga u povijesti. Ali ako se u najtežim situacijama ne možemo osloniti na razmišljanje, što onda da radimo? Misao je, na kraju krajeva, najviše ljudsko postignuće, zar ne?
Možda nije. Ima nešto što nadilazi razmišljanje, unatoč njegovoj uistinu iznimnoj moći. Razmišljanje se samo od sebe uruši u trenutku kada se život pokaže egzistencijalno nepodnošljivim. U takvim situacijama pomaže zapažanje na dubljoj razini, a ne razmišljanje.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Sometimes
Is a good answer to any existential question.”
― Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“seeing is believing they say and if boundaries are limitless are we? or is existence twofold and doomed before the sights are set and if so does God really weep for humanity and must we continue to seek sustenance through escapism and do sporting events in all their microcosmic glory refute the tenets of nihilism or should we simply accept and wallow in our ignorance unbearable lightness of being creatures who feel what -- I don’t know”
― Scott C. Holstad, Street Poems

“Which should you choose between dying or living and suffering eternal torment? Of course, you should choose the latter, because only while living can a person find a solution to his problems, the most vital thing you need for all your problems is existence! As long as you exist, anything is possible!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“There was only that bobbing bundle of stringy, dirty-blonde hair fading into a sea of other heads bobbing and faces coming and going, of storylines intersecting and entwining and then fraying only to become irretrievably lost in the interminable wave-pattern of curiosities fleeting and nothingness everlasting.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause