How to Use existentialist in a Sentence

existentialist

1 of 2 noun

• To an existentialist, this should not come as a grand scoop or groundbreaking news.
  — Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books, 13 Jan. 2022
• This is an existentialist play.
  — Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant, 1 Mar. 2026
• Crewe deftly sets the stage for a climactic, existentialist choice.
  — Nikhil Krishnan, The New Yorker, 16 Jan. 2023
• But Williams is an old-fashioned existentialist.
  — Andrea Long Chu, Vulture, 5 Aug. 2025
• That’s a profound, existentialist point, so the only possible follow-up is snacks.
  — Natasha O'Neill, Vanity Fair, 9 June 2026
• This is the film in which the existentialist romance is most explicitly linked to the historical moment.
  — Lidija Haas, The New Republic, 2 Dec. 2020
• An existentialist peers into the abyss and feels a shiver of possibility, the freedom to be anything.
  — Zachary Fine, New Yorker, 9 Feb. 2026
• Most surprising of all is that an existentialist show that doles out philosophy weekly managed to succeed in primetime.
  — Paula Bernstein, Fortune, 19 Sep. 2019
• Clibanoff seems the romantic, hopeful one here; Emmons the existentialist.
  — Edith Newhall, Philly.com, 4 May 2017
• In either worldview, existentialist or Christian, the instructions are the same.
  — Matt Winesett, National Review, 4 Apr. 2020
• His robotic counterpart, dressed all in black like the professor, did as good a job, if not better, of answering a key existentialist question on the meaning of robots.
  — ABC News, 28 May 2026
• The works avoid direct protest and instead offer symbolic narratives that tell wide-ranging existentialist stories.
  — Ray Mark Rinaldi, The Know, 4 Mar. 2017
• The existentialist who sits at my desk feels we are each individually thrown into the deep end of existence and tasked with swimming, and that this is a terrifying and heavy task.
  — Zadie Smith, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
• But Bacon, a thoroughgoing existentialist, didn’t have a spiritual bone in his body.
  — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 31 July 2019
• An amoral existentialist whose backstory becomes clear late in the going, Danny is a former mercenary soldier.
  — Sheri Linden, HollywoodReporter, 8 Dec. 2025
• The original existentialists, all those lovely, gallant, puffing-their-ciggies Parisian men and women, were very happy for everything to be a dilemma.
  — James Parker, The Atlantic, 23 Sep. 2025
• That makes Luster an existentialist novel, like The Stranger, and a relative to literary modernism.
  — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 11 Aug. 2020
• The mountain in Morocco is existentialist.
  — Anne Thompson, IndieWire, 12 Nov. 2025
• An exhibition in Boston features delightfully unsettling works with a sci-fi existentialist downer vibe.
  — Peter Plagens, WSJ, 6 Apr. 2019
• Beauvoir modeled Pascal on the young Merleau-Ponty, the future existentialist philosopher.
  — Benita Eisler, WSJ, 22 Oct. 2021
• Although an extremely difficult commercial path lies ahead, this epic-length existentialist road movie should enjoy a strong festival run following its world premiere at Rotterdam.
  — Richard Kuipers, Variety, 31 Jan. 2022
• Barbara Stanwyck, a slinking powerhouse in the role), before instructing her in the work of existentialist Fredrich Nietzsche.
  — Alison Willmore, Vulture, 6 Dec. 2021
• More so than any of his later projects, All Is Lost puts his athleticism in service to an existentialist story about the struggle being the point of life’s journey, which has the same ending for everybody.
  — Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture, 17 Sep. 2025
• Steeped in absurdist ideas, the existentialist comedy presents the actress as Caterine Vauban, a sort of antagonist whose nihilistic views on life go against widespread optimism.
  — Carlos Aguilar, Los Angeles Times, 21 July 2021
• Thåström is written as a harsh existentialist, political and speaks succinctly, while Cave is the opposite, a struggling Dionysian agnostic, and a romantic dreamer who swims in words.
  — Alex Ritman, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 June 2022
• The spirituality and egotistical heroism of it all is a staple of the genre, and very Wagner—yet the abstraction and performance lean so much more into the realm of modernist, existentialist art.
  — Rosa Sanchez, Harper's BAZAAR, 13 Mar. 2023
• An existentialist’s driving concern is human freedom and the responsibilities and anxieties that are inseparable from it.
  — Edward Mendelson, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2016
• The existentialist philosopher argued that the commandment offers a far more radical proposition, one that requires us to surrender our commitment to justice, fairness, and private property.
  — Meghan O'Gieblyn, Wired, 7 Feb. 2022
• Once known for his distanced, adversarial, bleak and bloody narratives and existentialist murder balladeer persona, a kinder, more optimistic Cave has emerged after 2015’s tragedy.
  — A.d. Amorosi, Variety, 29 Mar. 2022
• Like its gruesome predecessors, his latest full-length work features adorably designed anthropomorphic animals (and mushrooms) navigating bleak realities and confronting existentialist concerns.
  — Carlos Aguilar, Variety, 15 May 2026

existentialist

2 of 2 adjective

• As Thornton is otherwise largely silent onstage, what’s going on inside the actor’s head while Reeves and Winter share droll, existentialist banter?
  — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 17 Dec. 2025
• More so than any of his later projects, All Is Lost puts his athleticism in service to an existentialist story about the struggle being the point of life’s journey, which has the same ending for everybody.
  — Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture, 17 Sep. 2025
• This existentialism is far from the heroic, politically committed, existentialist vision of Sartre and de Beauvoir.
  — Sheila Heti august 25, Literary Hub, 25 Aug. 2025
• Paris was producing existentialist literature, but London had Bacon, the artist of existentialist life, a reckless gambler and homosexual masochist.
  — Dominic Green, WSJ, 15 June 2018
• This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent.
  — Christopher Beha, New Yorker, 14 Feb. 2026
• The contrast between the Vietnamese who humped through rice paddies documenting their own country’s existentialist struggle, and the foreigners who flew around on helicopters and were given US military ranks adds emotional depth and historical nuance.
  — Literary Hub, 19 Dec. 2025
• Ultimately, this film’s absurd existentialist deadpan aligns Lanthimos’ work here closer to Ruben Östlund than ever — himself a filmmaker likely drawing from Lanthimos these days — to mine the comedy of repetitious futility to disorienting effect.
  — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 28 Aug. 2025
• Merging photography with storytelling, AECP reimagines classics like Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy–itself a Hopper homage–and seminal existentialist American scene captured by Hopper in his 1942 painting Nighthawks.
  — Lee Sharrock, Forbes.com, 7 Aug. 2025