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“When life and man are robotized, all time is equated with quantity. Time becomes like a commodity that can be bought, enjoyed, used and saved. This corresponds to the objective time (kronos in Greek) that we measure with the clock. But there are other kinds of time. For example, the subjective time (kairos in Greek) occurs at crucial moments in life. You stand at a crossroads and time stands still. In such time pockets, the spiritual questions come to the fore, but in order to draw attention to them, we need a different pace of life and the awareness of presence: It is now that life takes place!”

Tomas Bernling in an essay in the Swedish book “Ompröva livet!” (meaning reconsider life in English), published in 2009.

“What was really needed  was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly.”

Viktor E. Frankl in his book “Man’s Serach For Meaning - The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust” (first published in German in 1946)

“This cyclical nature of the seasons of the spirit is counter to our dominant cultural narrative of self-improvement, with its ethos of linear progression toward states of ever-increasing flourishing. It is counter, too, to the world’s major spiritual traditions, with their ideas of salvation and enlightenment.”

Maria Popova, www.themarginalian.org

“Phenomenology aims to arrive at an understanding of individual human experience, not by explaining it with a number of fixed laws, as natural science does, but by opening out the richness and mystery of life by successive description, a bit like the way an artist works, but more systematic. We call this being ‘experience-near’. Picasso was being a phenomenologist when he said ‘I can’t paint a tree. But I can paint the feeling you have when you look at a tree’ (quoted in Hare 2002).”

Martin Adams in his book A Concise Introduction to Existential Counselling (2013)

“Emerge yourself in the question. Answers tend to drive us away from authentication. Dwell in uncertainty. Anxiety is not a medical condition, it’s awakening.” 

- Professor Kevin Aho, giving a lecture under The Global Existential Summit 2022

“Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”

- Simone De Beauvoir