Claire Messud Quotes

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

I really believe that 'Saw' makes us stop and think and question our motives and what we're doing here on Earth.

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

I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I like films that deal with some of those questions that you can never answer: 'Why are we here? What's it about? What happens to us with the choices that we make? What are the ramifications for doing something right, or doing something wrong?' Those universal questions, I enjoy.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

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;

As Socrates I believe said the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that's true. I do believe that.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

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?'

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

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.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

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

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

How we come to be, and how we are what we are, is beyond any understanding. I have been obsessed by this, trying to understand the very nature of my existence.

The meaning of life is life.