Federico Fellini Quotes

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?

Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

... deprived of pain, and also deprived of danger, able to do what it wants, [Nature] does not need us, nor understands our deserts, and it cannot be angry.

pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence

Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.

As long as one suffers one lives.

The living will envy the dead.

In the end, life makes victims of us all.

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

The SF [Supreme Fascist, i.e. God] created us to enjoy our suffering. The sooner we die, the sooner we defy His plans.

The only way to remove pain from death is to remove love from life.

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

Death laid its eggs in the wound

There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings of those terms. Humanism contends that instead of the gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods.

There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

I still think that maybe the "afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe we are just matter, and matter gets recycled

Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!