Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

I love the idea of a very simple 8-bit video game character struggling with the complex question: 'isn't there more to life than the role I've been assigned?'

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.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

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

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory;

At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

I suppose for a very long time I've been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

I fell in love with this idea of an old school game character, like Donkey Kong, who looks like a very simple guy but is really wrestling with this very profound struggle: 'What's the meaning of life? What if I don't like this job I've been programmed to do?'

And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning. I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly, as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me, as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer, an evil, was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life; but I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life—a life of indulgence of desires—was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, “Life is evil and an absurdity,” referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

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.

If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

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

Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for?

Try as I do to comprehend the human project and my part in it, I am further than ever from understanding the monstrous everyday things that seem like self-evident truths and existential necessities to so many.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

It seems essential to try to find some meaning to life and I guess Jungian philosophy is the one that's helped me understand myself and the world more than anything else.