Existential Dread Quotes

What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. ~ Milan Kundera

I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief. ~ Alan Moore

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway. ~ Anne Lamott

I have decided to keep a record of my inmost real-self thoughts. Perhaps it will help me to find out what I really am like: horrid, I know: selfish, conceited, and material-minded. For instance, lately whenever I've tried to concentrate on anything serious or beautiful, I've started thinking about the Spencers' dance next week. I am ashamed of my pettiness. I'm going to try to do better this year
develop my character more and not always be thinking about enjoying myself. I've always been so happy, I dread disappointment and unhappiness, but they would be good for me. But I don't want them. ~ Rosamond Lehmann

I think when people say they dread going into work on Monday morning, it's because they know they are leaving a piece of themselves at home. Why not see what happens when you challenge your employees to bring all of their talents to their job and reward them not for doing it just like everyone else, but for pushing the envelope, being adventurous, creative, and open-minded, and trying new things? ~ Tony Hsieh

Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe. ~ Patrick Modiano

[Grant me from the blessed gods prosperity, and] from all mankind the possession ever of good repute; [and that I may thus be a delight to my friends, and an affliction to my foes, but the first revered], by the other beheld with dread. ~ Solon

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded. ~ Edmund Burke

Anyone who's a parent dreads that call in the middle of the night. I have four grown children and I still dread it. ~ Tony Dungy

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation
it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him. ~ Ian McEwan

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

Zen is not "attained" by mirror-wiping mediation, but by "self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now." We do not "come", we "are." Don't strive to become, but be. ~ Bruce Lee

Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Being in the audience of the State of the Union is not a passive experience. Every few minutes when the president completed a thought, everyone stood up to clap. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. The sound of the springs in the aged chairs of the House Chamber became a secondary soundtrack. I was distracted by my discomfort and began to dread the end of his sentences. But then I noticed that not every person stood up every single time. I realized they only stood up when he said something their side agreed with. I decided that no matter what he said next, I was going to stay seated. I was really hurting. I was going to sit one round out. Well, as soon as I'd made my mind up that I was staying put, President Obama made a statement and everyone stood up. Everyone. Not half of the room. Every person in the room except me. It happened far too fast for me to correct my mistake. What did he say? "We need equal pay for women." And I just sat there like a jerk. If the president himself had looked up and to the left, he'd have seen me just sitting there, seemingly opposed to equal pay for women! Good grief! I was not seated next to the first lady, thankfully. I made sure to stand up the rest of the time. ~ Noah Galloway

In her more lucid moments, she knew that half her life had been sacrificed to safeguard her secret heart, to appease that unreasonable, mortal dread she suffered of being suddenly revealed to others in a nakedness of spirit that terrified her more than the concept of God's own retribution itself. ~ Raymond Kennedy

There was something vampiric about. music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe in the supernatural ... the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music. ~ Anne Rice

Meditation is a mysterious method of self-restoration.
It involves "shutting" out the outside world, and by that means sensing the universal "presence" which is, incidentally, absolute perfect peace.
It is basically an existential "time-out" - a way to "come up for a breath of air" out of the noisy clutter of the world.
But don't be afraid, there is nothing arcane or supernatural or creepy about the notion of taking a time-out. Ball players do it. Kids do it, when prompted by their parents. Heck, even your computer does it (and sometimes not when you want it to).
So, why not you?
A meditation can be as simple as taking a series of easy breaths, and slowly, gently counting to ten in your mind. ~ Vera Nazarian

People use each other
as a healing for their pain. They put each other
on their existential wound,
on the eye, on the cunt, on mouth and open hand.
They hold each other and won't let go. ~ Yehuda Amichai

The biological imperative to live - indeed, live forever - was burned into our brains, into our emotional self-model,
over the course of millennia. But our brand-new cognitive self-models
tell us that all attempts to realize this imperative will ultimately be futile.
Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential conflict, and we seem to be the first creatures on this planet to
experience it consciously. ~ Thomas Metzinger

Oh, you a E head, oh, you a weed head
I got a big gun, bigger than Maxi Priest dread ~ Sean Price

The bravest man feels an anxiety 'circa praecordia' as he enters the battle; but he dreads disgrace yet more. ~ Horatio Nelson

You do see me crossing the meadow
stiff and dead from the mist?
I long for that home,
that home I've never had,
and without any hope
that I'll ever be able to reach it.
For such a home, never touched,
I carry that longing that will
never die, like that meadow dies
stiff and dead from the mist.
You do see me crossing it, full of dread? ~ Robert Walser

When we think of globalization we are thinking in part of structures and institutions that have been developed over time and that have allowed us to become more interdependent and interrelated. But the development, the extraordinary development, of those structures and institutions has not fundamentally transformed our humanity. We are still those animals with fears and anxieties and insecurities in the face of death and dread and disappointment and disease. ~ Cornel West

Maintaining a safe distance, she practiced extreme caution as they headed further and further away from the center of the city. She tried to act casual when passing people on the street while simultaneously keeping an eye on the elusive John Smith. That part wasn't hard of course because most of the people headed in their direction moved submissively to the other side as her mysterious new neighbor passed. Choking down a feeling of dread, she wondered if she'd be smart to do the same and head back to the apartment. Against her better judgment, Evangeline pushed on. ~ Shawn Kirsten Maravel

I dread karaoke. I hate karaoke. I can't sing - that is why. ~ Clive Owen

A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the "Fuck." As in life itself. ~ Don Winslow

You never suffer nearly as much as you imagine you suffer. You never suffer the illnesses you most dread nor the miseries that you fear. ~ Osho

Sometimes a revolution turns into an actual government, or at the very least an actual way of life that contrasts with days past like blood on snow. Such was the case in France, where even as the guillotine released a steady river of gore, Royalist insurrections were suppressed by what had become a sophisticated military.

In Toulon, the Royalist insurrection in 1793 led to an actual siege by republicans, spearheaded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. The Royalists in Toulon, supported by the British and Spanish, were feared by the republicans as an existential threat to every hope and promise of the revolution. For months there were bombardments, cannon fire that made the windows in the prison tremble. ~ Kelsey Brickl

Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Dreams surround our desires with ugliness and dread. ~ Mason Cooley

And the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man -- born to perish -- when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Remember, if you cannot live with yourself, you cannot live with anyone else. The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. ~ Osho

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

We see that hyperactivity and reward areas are important when the bubble's rising. People getting caught up in it. We also see areas involving mentalizing, which means thinking about other people: Who's buying? Who's selling? Do they know something? We see emotional areas before the crash that indicate a sense of uncertainty or dread. ~ Colin Camerer

As advanced as mankind likes to think it is, we all have that age-old, primal, undeniable dread of darkness. Of being unable to see danger coming. We don't like to think that we're afraid of the dark anymore, but if that's true, then why do we work so hard to make sure our cities are constantly lit? We cloak ourselves in so much light that we can barely see the stars at night. ~ Anonymous

I slammed the door shut before we had a cold buffet in the front corridor. The shouts grew louder, denied their target. If I had better aim I'd have opened the door and tossed it all right back at them. But with my luck I'd hit the sleeping baby or an innocent old grandmother out for her morning constitution. And then we'd be dragged through the streets for certain.
Dread uncurled in the pit of my stomach.
"Is that cabbage?" Colin asked, coming out of the dining room. Listening to the raised voices, he reached for the doorknob, frowning.
I caught his hand. "Don't."
"Whyever not?"
I raised an eyebrow. "You'll get a rotted meat tart in the eye for your trouble,that's why. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

As much as we seek approval, we dread condemnation ~ Dale Carnegie

I waited, Rachel. I waited until you were old enough. I wasted my time looking for girls who came even remotely close to looking like you." His hand brushed through my hair as he studied it. "Long legs. Long, straight, near-black hair. Eyes the exact color of sapphires." A heavy sigh left him and his forehead creased. "But none of them were you. None of them had your temper; none of them had your fire for life. So none of them deserved to have your beauty." "Like Jenn." I realized it with dread and watched his face twist with a look of disgust. "Everything I've done up until this point has been for you and our future together. I only wish," he said against my lips, "that you would stop being so goddamn difficult. ~ Molly McAdams

Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear ~ E.F. Schumacher

Yesterday, I was in Hatchards, and I saw a photograph of it, the usual view from Darjeeling. Everything flooded back. The cold. The silence. The dread. It was so overwhelming that I staggered outside and vomited in the gutter. People thought I was drunk. ~ Michelle Paver