Existential Crisis Quotes

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.

Most people are living lives of sort of survival. And constantly posing an existential crisis, either through fantasy or oblivion, really has been pretty much explored in rock and roll. At least in the western version of rock n' roll.

I think that obviously the quest for purpose, or meaning, or understanding to existence is something that I always think about, always deal with. I guess everybody does - that existential crisis of human condition. It's nothing new. But I'd love to come across something that really made me believe in something.

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.

There's this existential crisis in America and in the West of, like - who am I? - based on this searching for individual fulfillment, which you don't necessarily have in the East in the same way because you're kind of told what to do. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just saying that's just, like, the reality.

I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.

I had an existential crisis at the Oscars, sitting next to Sean Penn and Meryl Streep, and being like, 'What am I doing here? I don't belong here'. I felt like it could all be taken away.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

I'm really enjoying growing up. I feel like so much of my life was in an existential crisis when I was young, and I don't feel as bogged down by that anymore.

About every year or two, there is a moment of truth where there's some new development in the marketplace, some new technology, some sort of existential crisis. You just have to be vigilant about looking out for those moments.

I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

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.

[Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ...and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view-i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive.

A lot of times when you do things where you're killing people, the character is always having an existential crisis about it. It's fun to be no-holds-barred and have no big crisis of conscious.

Of course, the surest way to free yourself from an existential crisis is through comedy.

I went to school, and I remember that you had to do these tests to find out what set you're in - how clever you are. I put down "Kit Harington," and they looked at me like I was completely stupid, and they said, "No, you're Christopher Harington, I'm afraid." It was only then I learnt my actual name. That was kind of a bizarre existential crisis for an 11-year-old to have, but in the end I always stuck with Kit, because I felt that's who I was. I'm not really a "Chris."

When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if 'I'm good.' You don't find oak trees having existential crisis. 'I feel so rotten about myself. I don't produce as much acorns as the one next to me.'

I always had an existential crisis, trying to figure out ‘what does it all mean?’ I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then, we’re better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened. That’s the only way to move forward.

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, The 5th Wave, explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us.