Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

I realized that every second that I'm alive, the world cares less about me. It's just a very linear, downward progression. And it sounds cynical because you guys are young and you're full with life. I want you to understand - this is it. You have nothing to look forward to because you're peaking. If you're not having fun now, kill yourself. I don't mean that in a bad way, just - it's not worth it to go forward.

The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

Even as a teenager, I felt that for whatever reason that we were living very close to the end of human history. And now at my age I believe that with almost an increasing certainty.

Life is wasted on the living.

Life and death are important. Don't suffer them in vain.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

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.

Spending your days waiting to die is no way to live.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.

Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.

The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.

I was never young. This idea of fun: cars, girls, saturday night, bottle of wine... to me, these things are morbid. I was always attracted to people with the same problems as me. It doesn't help when most of them are dead.

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?