Existential Fear Quotes

People continue to fear dying, only because no one ever has.

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I'll say that. Wonder and terror.

After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,--those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity?

If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.

People are afraid of their own lives. Shouldn't your goal be to have a meaningful life? Unknown, mysterious, thrilling?

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

We're afraid to live, because we're afraid of dying.

Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.

I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.

I'm afraid of death... Yes, but that doesn't stop death coming.

Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.

Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death. Death scares the hell out of who you think you are, especially if you think you are this body.

The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

He who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living being and thou wilt not cease to live.

I am afraid of death. I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give my life.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

Living is what scares me. Dying is easy.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

The biggest fear that everybody has is dying. Not to get too meta on you, but I think every fear that people are trying to work out is really like I'm going to die and no one is going to care, and it doesn't matter because God might not exist. That's what people are trying to figure out. I wish we all had one fear so we could think about it together and figure out a solution, but we're all doing different things.

You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.