19 Quotes For Your Existential Crisis

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. –Wendell Berry

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Struggle is what it means to be alive and free. –David Budbill

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. ―Stanley Kubrick

Since water still flows, though we cut it with swords,
And sorrow returns, though we drown it with wine,
Since the world can in no way satisfy our cravings,
Let us loosen our hair tomorrow and go fishing. –Li Po

It is a confession that we do not have such a prodigious head as is required to answer the question what is happening, that we cannot get on top of what is happening, that we are stuck in the middle of it, in medias res, inter-esse, amazing and bewildered. We cannot soar over what is happening with philosophy’s eagle-wings. What’s happening has clipped our wings. -John Caputo

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. –Rainer Maria Rilke

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing. –Annie Dillard

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within. –Rainer Maria Rilke

There is no “answer,” no cognitive solution, to the questions that self-destructive people put. They are, I think, putting questions before which philosophers no less than their analysts (if they can afford one) are struck dumb, the difference being the philosophers’ ignorance comes cheaper. Moreover, self-destructive people do not require an answer so much as companionship. We are all children of the same dark night, inhabited by the same demons, haunted by the same spectres… It is not a question of finding an answer to the night of truth but of sitting up with one another through the night, of dividing the abyss in half in a companionship that is its own meaning. –John Caputo

There must be a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. –Sylvia Plath

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

Some men become what they were born for. –Sheenagh Pugh

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension. –Joshua Loth Liebman

There is scarcely any passion without struggle. ―Albert Camus

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself
Together
For some clear “meaning”—some momentary summary?
No one
Can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day;
The ordinary blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the health sometimes. –John Tagliabue

You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait. –Rainer Maria Rilke

The joys that life has to offer are entirely internal. Life is like a game we enjoy playing. One desires life for the sake of life. “If someone asked life for a thousand years, ‘why do you live?’” Meister Eckhart said, “then if it could answer, it would say nothing other than ‘I live because I live.’” One is not trying to get somewhere with life, and it would make no more sense to offer someone help in getting where life is going—death—than it would to offer a jogger a ride in one’s car. In fact there are laws against offering such help. –John Caputo

Know when to quit and have a margarita. -Unknown