Tom Robbins Quotes

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

We have no rational evidence that there exists another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

Let's say that life is this square of the sidewalk. We are born at this crack and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square and in the process of walking outside of it. Suddenly, we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

We're on this planet for the briefest of moments in cosmic terms, and I want to spend that time thinking about what I consider the deepest questions.

There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.