Ellen Willis Quotes

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for 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.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

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.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

There's a lot of times when I feel nihilistic, and lose hope, like I'm just lost in the world. But there's a lot of times when I can kinda be in control of destiny.

Without faith, life is futile.

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.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

When you don't believe in anything except not dying, you don't really believe in anything.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

She believed, of course ... because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

I think life without spirit is in the dark, it is absurd.

Without hope we are lost.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

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.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.