Existential Questioning Quotes

Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face."

"O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?

When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things - when wilt thou drink this strange soul -
- When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide. ~ Robin Wasserman

Ather than Eisenstein's fast and hard cutting, I like to hold the shot very still and for longer than we're accustomed to. For me personally as a viewer, this technique invariably causes me to have waves of emotions that I think arise from a profound form of mindful awareness and the feelings that go along with that. I am frequently brought to tears by this kind of existential cinematic technique. ~ Jenni Olson

You're a mountain
searching for it's echo! Whenever you hurt, you say, Lord God! The answer lives in that
which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this.
They make you clear. When they're gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where
to go. This is because you're uneven in your opening: sometimes closed and unreachable,
sometimes, with your shirt torn with longing. Your discursive intellect dominates for a
time; then the universal, beyond-time intelligence comes. Sell your questioning talents, my
son; buy bewildering surrender. Live simply and helpfully in that. Don't worry about
the University of Bukhara with its prestigious curriculum. ~ Rumi

For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy. ~ George MacDonald

But Eve - ow whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself. ~ Laura Dave

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, 'Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.'" John 7:37-38 (NIV)

As soon as we were old enough to understand fairy tales, we were told to start looking for the one.

Someday my prince will come.
Someday I'll find my love.

As we got older, Prince Charming looked a bit different. Our teenage hearts thrilled when the latest vocal sensation sang about finding us and how our love would last forever.

Wherever we turned, we were told our soul mate was waiting. And we were led to believe we were "less than" if we didn't find the one who would complete us!

Even now, whether we're 15, 45 or 75, the equation hasn't changed: "Guy + Me = Valuable."

So, if the movies, books and songs are so right, how come when we find the one, we can still feel like we're missing something? Why are there married people who are lonely with an emptiness that marriage can't fill? Our hearts can get confused if our reality doesn't match fantasy and we wonder:

Maybe my one isn't really the one? Or, whether we're married or single, we might wonder, is the one for me still out there?

In this place of uncertainty our hearts can grow perplexed. If we find ourselves in this vulnerable place of questioning, and all of a sudden a guy who seems ~ Lynn Cowell

Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I found something for you." He ignored the pangs of hunger and lowered himself to one knee before her. Her eyes widened. He swung his hand around from behind his back and held out a lone orchid the same shade as the moon overhead. And once again, he wished he knew what to say, how to talk to her, how to be more sophisticated. Instead, he thrust it before her. She tentatively took it from him and lifted questioning eyes. "For your collection of specimens," he offered. Her fingers caressed the drooping petals. "I think it's a yellow lady's slipper." He didn't know nor did he care. He only knew that he wanted one of her rare smiles. For a long intense moment, he held his breath. Finally her lips curved into a smile. "Thank you." His pulse jolted forward and he swallowed hard. "You're welcome." What was happening to him? Why did he want to make her happy? When she lifted the flower to her nose and took a deep breath, her smile moved to her eyes . . . And to his heart. ~ Jody Hedlund

To Lillian's surprise, she had been seated near the head of Lord Westcliff's table, only three places away from his right hand. Occupying a place so close to the host was a mark of high favor, very seldom given to an unmarried girl with no rank. Wondering if the footman had make a mistake in seating her there, she glanced cautiously at the faces of those guests nearest her, and saw that they too were puzzled by her presence. Even the countess, who was being seated at the very end of the table, stared at her with a frown.
Lillian gave Lord Westcliff a questioning glance as he took his place at the head of the table. One of his dark brows arched. "Is something amiss? You seem a bit perturbed, Miss Bowman."
The correct response would probably have been to blush and thank him for the unexpected honor. But as Lillian stared at his face, which was softened by the influence of candleglow, she found herself answering with brazen frankness. "I am wondering why I am sitting near the head of the table. In light of what happened this morning, I assumed you would have me seated all the way out on the back terrace."
There was a moment of utter silence as the guests around them registered shock that Lillian would so openly refer to the conflict between them. However, Westcliff astonished them all by laughing quietly, his gaze locked with hers. After a moment, the others joined in with forced chuckles.
"Knowing of your penchant for trouble, Miss Bowman, I have conclud ~ Lisa Kleypas

I beg your pardon for questioning your judgement," she said. "It is nothing to me, after all, if it proves faulty. I am not the one responsible for the Marquess of Atherton's heir and sole offspring. I am not the one who will be toppled from my pedestal if the world learns I have not only permitted but encouraged my nephew to associate with the most shocking persons. I am not the one who-"
"I wish you were the one who had heard of the rule Silence is Golden," he said. ~ Loretta Chase

Only a few years ago did it suddenly dawn on me that my existential fear regarding my nation's future and my moral outrage regarding my nation's occupation policy are not unconnected. On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people. On the other hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of our condition. ~ Ari Shavit

The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity. ~ Christian Wiman

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity. ~ Bergen Evans

Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place ~ Douglas Coupland

When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles. ~ Ali Liebegott

I don't know who I am, and who I'm not, I don't know who I'm supposed to be, and I miss who I was; I miss it every day, Kate, but there's no place for that August anymore. No place for the version of me who wanted to go to school, and have a life, and feel human, because this world doesn't need that August. It needs someone else. ~ Victoria Schwab

Art is the questioning of culture ~ Gerard Mortier

I'm not on drugs, Ben. I'm having an existential crisis. ~ Kim Fielding

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski

For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery - that most unstable existential moment - the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. ~ Richard Rhodes

Questioning this most dearly held core of the Dutch sense of self not only is felt as a direct attack, it also means that the nonbeliever, the antiracist killjoy, is putting himself or herself above "us," which in itself again runs deeply counter to another strand in the Dutch sense of self: "gelijke monnikken, gelijke kappen" (literally, equal monks, equal cowls), which invokes the deep egalitarian strand in Dutch self-representation. Critical self-reflection, moreover and ironically, is a scarce commodity in a culture that delights in imagining itself as "nothing," "just normal" (Ramdas 1998), without specific characteristics, much less infused with deep racializations. The point of not knowing, racial ignorance, and innocence has long passed. ~ Gloria Wekker

People are questioning if Ted Cruz can legally run for president because he was born in Canada. And the last thing we want to do is pave the way for a President Bieber. ~ Conan O'Brien

So... what's the trick?" At Loch's questioning look he sniffed. "You planning to run off under an illusion? Maybe your unicorn will fly you away? You've had an angle this whole time. I respect that. So... what's it going to be this time, young lady?"
"The trick," Loch said, drawing her blade, "is that this time, the young lady kicks your ass."
The first rays of dawn shimmered off their blades as steel met steel. ~ Patrick Weekes

You think it's a game?
Unintelligible? Ha!
Envision no spoons.

This is serious.
It is a matter of joy
versus emptiness. ~ Kristen Henderson

When you're meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things you're in - I'm in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down - there's a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that's ... that's what I'll have when I'm alone. ~ David Foster Wallace

Perhaps we are able to see only that which we are prepared to see, and in our culture, the cost of insight is an uncertainty that threatens our already unstable sense of order and requires a constant questioning of accepted assumptions. Ralph Ellison (1995a, 31) ~ Black Hawk Hancock

To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe. ~ Truman G. Madsen

Find comfort in questioning yourself. ~ Bryant McGill

The industrial age has transformed our material well-being, but these improvements have come at the cost of our beliefs: belief in our special place in the universe; belief in an omnipresent god; belief in country and community; belief in monogamy and marriage, and belief in our values. What, then, holds up the foundations of society when these beliefs finally fall away? ~ Sean A. Culey

Forgetting herself entirely, Pandora let her head loll back against Gabriel's shoulder. "What kind of glue does Ivo use?" she asked languidly.
"Glue?" he echoed after a moment, his mouth close to her temple, grazing softly.
"For his kites."
"Ah." He paused while a wave retreated. "Joiner's glue, I believe."
"That's not strong enough," Pandora said, relaxed and pensive. "He should use chrome glue."
"Where would he find that?" One of his hands caressed her side gently.
"A druggist can make it. One part acid chromate of lime to five parts gelatin."
Amusement filtered through his voice. "Does your mind ever slow down, sweetheart?"
"Not even for sleeping," she said.
Gabriel steadied her against another wave. "How do you know so much about glue?"
The agreeable trance began to fade as Pandora considered how to answer him.
After her long hesitation, Gabriel tilted his head and gave her a questioning sideways glance. "The subject of glue is complicated, I gather."
I'm going to have to tell him at some point, Pandora thought. It might as well be now.
After taking a deep breath, she blurted out, "I design and construct board games. I've researched every possible kind of glue required for manufacturing them. Not just for the construction of the boxes, but the best kind to adhere lithographs to the boards and lids. I've registered a patent for the first game, and soon I intend to apply for two more."
Gabriel absorbed t ~ Lisa Kleypas

In reality, a person questioning the existence of the Satanic conspiracy is merely pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. In that case, one can understand why the emperor's tailors get upset and suggest the person doing the pointing is a tool of the devil. Then the question comes down to one of whether the crowd will believe the evidence they have before them, or if they will buy into the tailors' fantasies. ~ Michael A. Stackpole

The intelligent employer encourages challenge, questioning
not blind acceptance and "our Leader knows best" acclaim. ~ Mary Barnett Gilson

I didn't know if I should put my faith in God or Satan. Was there really a difference at the end of the day, when we were all going to be dead souls anyway? ~ Jess C. Scott

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well. ~ Javier Marias

My favorite scene was my dying scene, when I had to stand up and suddenly in that moment recall my wife and everything I stood for, and I say "My queen, my wife, my love" and I think of all my movies, that is the most powerful moment I ever had. In preparation for each take, I would scream at the ground, clench my fists, and scrape the ground, and cut all my knuckles and rip my nails... I would scream, and scrape, and scratch, and then I would stand and go "GO."
And they would film.
And it felt so visceral, and so powerful, and the next day, that was my last day of filming, the next day I was leaving Montreal and I went through US IMMIGRATION and the officer asked "what happened to your hands" and I said "I was just scratching the ground" and she took me for secondary questioning, and I missed my flight, and had to stay another day.
So the next day I wore gloves. ~ Gerard Butler

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

Because imaginary time behaves like another direction in space, histories in imaginary time can be closed surfaces, like the surface of the Earth, with no [existential] beginning or end. ~ Stephen Hawking

Arizona is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. We've cut school funding. And they pass a bill questioning Obama's citizenship? For real? ~ Kyrsten Sinema

I decided the map was clearly written by masochistic-doodling ancient Egyptians because everything was hieroglyphics and unreadable doodads.

I cursed the map.

"BY MOTHRA'S NIPPLES! I FUCKING HATE THIS MAP!"

Irrational anger bubbled to the surface and all I could think about was murdering the map. I would show the map who was boss.

I was boss.

Not some evil, wrong map from hell. I had no choice but to hit the map against the steering wheel several times, grunting and releasing a string of curses that would have made my sailor father proud. And maybe blush.

Then I opened my driver's side door, still grunting and raging, and slammed the map against the car, threw it on the ground, stomped on it, kicked it, and just generally assaulted it in every way I could think of. I'm a little embarrassed to admit, in my mindlessness I was also taunting the map, questioning its virility, flipping it the bird, and cursing now in Spanish as well as English.

It was the most cardio I'd done in over twelve months.

Stupid map, making me do cardio. I'll kill you! ~ Penny Reid

WHEN I INTERVIEWED ISABELLE HUPPERT, I mentioned in passing that she has the strongest body of work of any actress in the world. She insisted otherwise, and I insisted back, and she denied it again, and I conceded that maybe, just maybe, Meryl Streep might be tied with her in the magnificent résumé department. To which Huppert said something quite interesting:

"You know, it's more again a symptom - I mean it really tells something about our relationship to cinema in Europe, which is slightly different [than here in the U.S.]. Here it seems like, you reach a certain point, actresses work less. And maybe also we have this idea to make movies more cultural than entertaining, a more existential thing than here. And so together it makes [for] a different relation to our craft." ~ Mick LaSalle

I am nothing--nothing--nothing. She was clinging to that, she found, as to a sort of anchor, because it kept her from having to face the terrible possibility that God Himself was not, and the realization of God's nothingness would be the final horror that could not be borne. Yet as time passed she knew that that possibility, too, must be faced. She must let go of the very last thing left her, the knowledge of her own nothingness, and face it. And she let go, and looked around for God and did not find Him; and then there was nothing, except the dark night.
But there was the dark night. Very slowly she became conscious of it, and then she found that she was hugging it to her, wrapping herself in it as though it were a cloak to hide her in this hour of her humiliation. For a long while the night was all that she had, and then suddenly, like a sword stabbing the darkness, came a trill of music. It was a bird welcoming the dawn. That, too, was added. She drew back one of the curtains of her bed and saw a patch of grey light where the window was. That also. During the hours of the night she had been completely stripped, and now one by one a few things were being handed to her for the clothing of her naked, shivering, humiliated soul. For a few things one must have to make one decent if one was to step forth again upon the highway. For that, obviously, impossible though the task seemed to her at this moment, was what she had to do as soon as the full day came, because there was ~ Elizabeth Goudge

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths. ~ Rollo May

This dual position suggests a basic tension or 'existential dilemma' in human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us, becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between or experience of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed them to be, and our experience of that 'between-ness' that emerges through our every encounter with the world. ~ Ernesto Spinelli

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies - Camus, Sartre, Beckett - that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward - or was it downward? - into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved - these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas - many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now - I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God. ~ Gary Kamiya

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish. ~ Tony Judt

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

Maybe It's not the biggest blockbuster film, but there will be some people that will see it, that will be debating it, that will be questioning their own sense of spirituality. If the film resonates, then I have succeeded in what I set out to do. ~ Eriq La Salle

They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species. ~ Naomi Klein

It meant leading my meta-life. Meta-life is the opposite of living in the moment. It's the syndrome of simultaneously having an experience and being an observer commenting on and questioning the experience. By observing something, you change it, sometimes for the better, but in my experience, usually for the worse. You know youre in the meta-life when you're critiquing an experience while you're having it (This is fun but it would be more fun if . . .), trying to talk yourself into happiness because you should feel it (It's a beautiful day, and all I really need to be happy are fresh air and sunshine), or worrying that youre not getting any closer to the "Big Important Things" (Sure, this is a great date, but what are the odds this guy would ever marry someone like me?). ~ Holly Shumas

Now leave. (Adron)
Why would I want to do that? I mean, heaven forbid I should be around someone who actually likes me. It's so much more fun to be here with you insulting my manhood and questioning my parentage every five seconds. (Tiernan) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon