Existential Quotes - Page 2

We all have an opportunity and responsibility to create a legacy. A legacy which is resilient, sustainable and authentic." - Jim Cookson, Doctoral Student, Ashridge Business School, UK, August 2014

We're really endless in a way. If time goes on forever, then any way you divide it is also forever. A tenth of infinity is infinity. It's only us that think the time is gone. It isn't. We're still there. Still at our wedding. Still on honeymoon. All the good times are still happening. Even in the middle of the bad times to come, we'll still be together. Forever, in a way.

Would any of you like to share your career aspirations within the class? Jim?I dunno, to be honest, I was just hoping to be able to keep the demons away...

You think it’s a game?Unintelligible? Ha!Envision no spoons.This is serious.It is a matter of joyversus emptiness.

He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us.

otThere’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

How do text messages make you feel existential?I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person.

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.