Existential Crisis Quotes

Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

How had he got here? Only a few minutes ago he'd been a kid, riding his bike to school, collecting comics, doing homework and watching TV. Over the years, a few trappings of adulthood had insinuated themselves into his life withoutmaking significant inroads. Real adult life seemed to exist over there, somewhere as distant and unreachable as Uranus. He had no idea how people crossed over to this place, or why - the demands of being grown up seemed exhausting. Look how I work all the time. See my silky girlfriend. Watch me exchange money for food. Admire my blood pressure.

~ Meg Rosoff

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.

~ Haruki Murakami

We each possess the ability creatively to respond to the ontological mystery of our existence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Embrace the void and have the courage to exist.

~ Dan Howell

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

~ Julian Barnes

Self-questioning – an effort to get in touch with our essential self – is an endless stream of thought.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?

~ A.m. Homes

Then you think, is this a better world, closer to theone before you knew of wars—earth wars? Before you found that canary in its cagelaying, barely heaving. And you took it outside and said, Go Free! Go free!But it died there, right in your hands…like all of life.Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

~ Derek Keck

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts.

~ Derek Keck

Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, comical. It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.

~ Saul Bellow

I do the splits perfectly in PE. I lose half a pound in two days. I get the spinach and pig-meat frittata from the lo-carb section for lunch. And no-one else knows. I mentally construct a MyFace status, polishing the memories carefully until they shine. The need to record my life is as fundamental as my need to breathe. Without MyFace, I'm floating. I have nothing to anchor me down, to prove I exist.

~ Louise O'neill

Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this

~ Philip K. Dick

A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that.

~ David Guterson

A series of disconcerting questions nibbles at hearts of troubled youths. These same unanswered questions, along with their acerbic toxins, reveal their pungent fumes more frequently and with greater intensity as a person rushes headfirst into life’s concrete jungle.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?

~ Winston Graham

I live to enjoy life by the littlest things, feeling the grass between my toes, breathing fresh air, watching the wind sway the trees, enjoying the company of loved ones, a deep conversation, getting lost in a good book, going for a walk in nature, watching my kids grow up. Just the feeling itself of being alive, the absolute amazing fact that we are here right now, breathing, thinking, doing.

~ Marigold Wellington