Existential Thought Quotes

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland. ~ Chester Elijah Branch

Ciba: "I thought you were supposed to be some big brave war hero. What about that goddamn gold star you polish every night?"
Natalya: "You know what this shiny piece of tin is, you fucking space cadet? It's the way stupid boys trick other stupid boys into dying for bullshit causes ... and I'm done acting like one of them. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

No one ever said at the end of his days; 'I have read my bible too much, I have thought of God too much, I have prayed too much, I have been too careful with my soul' ~ J.C. Ryle

I thought, "I don't want to be the only unfunny guy in this movie. I really would like to be somehow involved in the comedy if I'm going to do it." ~ David Morse

Nothing to be done about it now, she thought. You can relive a moment again and again and again. But you can't change it. That's the tragedy of time. "See? ~ Barbara J. Taylor

I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Emma: What do you want from me, Jules? What do you want me to do?
Jules: What do I want? I want you to know what it's like. To be tortured al the time, night and day, desperately wanting what you know you should never want, what doesn't even want you back. to know how it feels to understand that a decision you made when you were twelve years old means you can never have the one thing that would make you truly happy. I want you to dream about only one thing and want onlny one thing and obsess about only one thing like I do ...
Emma: Julian...
Jules: ... like I do with you! Like I do with you, Emma. I thought you loved me. I don't know how I got that so wrong. ~ Cassandra Clare

I wanted alot of tattoos but I never thought I was gonna be this rediculous. ~ Synyster Gates

Want me to do baths while you cook lasagna?" "That would be good," she said. "And please, don't forget the hard-to-get places - neck wrinkles, backs of ears, between toes. Your mother checks those things." He laughed a little emotionally. "She does, huh?" And he thought how lucky he was to have a mom like that. And now both Hannah and Matt would have one like that, too. Fussy. Committed. * ~ Robyn Carr

I was incredibly fatalistic. I just thought, 'If it works, it works.' But I've always been like that. I've never been easily impressed, and I've never thought I didn't deserve something. If I got it, then I deserved it. ~ Charlotte Rampling

The thought had crossed my mind, that in order to save this world from Hell, I might have to become the Devil. ~ Dean F. Wilson

I went into the room and sat next to Linus on the bed. I put my hand on his shoulder. I was always surprised at how soft other people were. I thought I felt his heartbeat, although it could have been my own. ~ Heather O'Neill

I guess I had never bothered to consider that there might such a thing as a boy, but now that I had found one, I thought it was just about the most wonderful concept in the world. He smelled of mud and sugar and an animal I'd never scented before, and a faint meaty odor clung to his fingers, so I licked them. ~ W. Bruce Cameron

The triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth. ~ Plato

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. ~ George Orwell

I know. 'Nick, go after psycho-ass and show him where he lives.' But might I point out that in doing this, I should qualify for hazard pay? (Nick)
Might I point out that staying here with me is far more hazardous to your health? (Acheron)
What? Am I still here? Oh no, sorry, thought I'd left ten minutes ago. (Nick) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The most shattering thought I've ever had is my personal accountability to God one day ~ Leonard Ravenhill

A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity ...
Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence.
(pg.115-116, "The Body and the Earth") ~ Wendell Berry

Humans thought that the world occurred and observation followed, despite their scientists demonstrating otherwise. ~ Sean Platt

When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity - everything was anonymous or pseudonymous - and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

I don't feel we need to be independent for me to feel confident in my Scottish identity. I think Scotland is pretty comfortable in its identity. We won't need independence to preserve it ... if we don't become independent, it won't disappear; it isn't under existential threat. ~ Nicola Sturgeon

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives. ~ George Lakoff

He swiveled his head towards Eddie. "Tell me how to get over to the Four Lads. Do I have to die again?"
If he did, he had a Beretta on him and he knew what kicking the bucket from a gunshot was like. Snore.
"Don't bother." Adrian cracked his knuckles. "They're not going to tell you anything. They can't."
What the fuck? "I thought I worked for them."
"You work for both sides, and they've given you all the help they can."
Jim looked back and forth between the two angels. Each of them had the tight expression of a guy with a shoestring noosing up his balls.
"Help?" he said. "Where's my goddamned help?"
"They gave you us, asshole," Adrian snapped. "And that's all they can do
I've already gone over and asked them who's supposed to be next. I figured it would help you, you ungrateful bastard. ~ J.R. Ward

When I first saw you, you were like a flood of sunshine. All the others wanted to kill you. They thought I was crazy. They laughed ... "
He means the other Shadow Men, Jenny thought.
"But I knew, and I watched you. You grew up and got more beautiful. You were so different from anything in my world. The others just watched, but I wanted you. Not to kill or to use up the way
the way they do with humans sometimes here. I needed you."
[ ... ]
"I couldn't see anything else, couldn't hear anything else. All I could think about was you. I wouldn't let anyone else hurt you, ever. I knew I had to have you, no matter what happend. They said I was crazy with love. ~ L.J.Smith

I doubt if these two fine, active minds [President and Mrs. Roosevelt] have ever inquiried how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made. ~ H.G.Wells

What do you want?" Belbalm had asked her. Safety, comfort, to feel unafraid. I want to live to grow old, Alex thought as she pulled the curtains closed. I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me. ~ Leigh Bardugo

I never really thought about acting as a child. It wasn't like, "This is the career that I want to pursue." So when I first started acting, I was more concerned with just being on a set and all of the woes of that, and I didn't really know it or understand it as a craft yet. ~ Blake Lively

If you were crossing the road and saw a black cat passing, you may possibly get hit by a car, or a mail boy or the sky could rain in summer, possibly snow. Those were theories, none of them were true. It was like karma; it only happens to you if you believed in them. Myths, Cecilia called them. The guy looked frozen. This is silly, she thought. He could not be that affected by the cat. Cecilia had been working here for a year and she wasn't struck by lightning, she was alive, of course, nobody chose the cat so this is why she was the oldest pet in the store. ~ Basma Salem

For a long time he watched her. When she was lost to sight, he was almost a little moved. But that's life, thought death. ~ Wolf Erlbruch

It's thought that this heightened sensitivity to similarities and differences during interleaved practice leads to the encoding of more complex and nuanced representations of the study material - a better understanding of how specimens or types of problems are distinctive and why they call for a different interpretation or solution. ~ Peter C. Brown

Sometimes life calls upon us to be the things we never thought we were meant to be. ~ Valerie Bowman

Rigid traditions capture souls
prisons of spiritual thought
man's religion has captured a god
grown too small and very weak. ~ David W. Earle

felt his nose carefully all the way up... "I thought it was gone," said Toby, trotting off again. "It's alright however. I am sure I couldn't blame it if it was to go. ~ Charles Dickens

It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was. ~ William Faulkner

I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm amazed. When I was 40, I thought I'd never make 50. And at 50 I thought the frosting on the cake would be 60. At 60, I was still going strong and enjoying everything. ~ Gloria Stuart

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? ~ Stephen King

He'd never called her. Wanted to. A hundred times. But every time he thought about it, his mind boiled up with every reason not to do it, every doubt he'd ever had about himself. ~ Ari Berk

Above, in discussing the perceptive notions of Jesus, remarkable concepts of Plato or the highly introspective lessons of Gautama and Lao Tzu, it took considerable discussion to explore the meaning and relate it to How Life Works. Islam presents no such deep pool of thought to pierce. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer