Lily Tomlin Quotes

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.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

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

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

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 searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

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.

The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

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.

The meaning of life is that nobody knows the meaning of life.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

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.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

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.

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

Does life have any meaningful purpose?

The most important question a human being has to face... What is it? The question, Why are we here?

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.