Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

All of this passes, and none of it means anything to me.It's all foreign to my fate, and even to fate as a whole. It'sjust unconsciousness, curses of protest when chance hurlsstones, echoes of unknown voices - a collectivemishmash of life.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

She was a woman attempting to make some sense of, and get some satisfaction from, a life that seemed to have no more logic than a roulette wheel.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

Everything is absurd.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.

I asked: 'What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?' And I replied to quite another question: 'What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?' With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: 'None'.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.