Jack Kerouac Quotes

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

In the end it doesn't matter what you do.

My own idea is that these things are as piffle before the wind.

It is nothing.

They were beautiful nothings

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

All is vanity, look you; and so the preacher is vanity too.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

There is no there there.

We have lived long enough to experience the hollowness of earth and the rottenness of all carnal promises.

It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Everything on earth is a game. A passing thing. We all end up dead. We all end up the same, don't we?

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

I searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.