Peter Ackroyd Quotes

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

I am a man of lost faiths.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for?

I guess I have a faith. I have an overriding feeling that all of this can't be for nothing. But then I also fully understand that it might be.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

The whole theme of Interview with the Vampire was Louis's quest for meaning in a godless world. He searched to find the oldest existing immortal simply to ask, What is the meaning of what we are?

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

I have moved from certainty to doubt, from devotion to rebellion.

I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading and thinking, I started to feel it was all so absurd: The whole idea of life after death is ridiculous.

Faith is Doubt.

For me, a spiritual and existential crisis is the same thing in that your foundation gets rocked.

Without faith, life is futile.

There are times when I love the world and love everyone, and I want to talk to everyone, and other times when I feel really disillusioned, and like none of this is real, nothing is real around me.

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.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

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.

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.

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

I still doubt it will work." "You'd doubt the sun's rising if you weren't proven wrong each day," Raoden said with a smile.

If we say that no one's out there And we say we're goin' nowhere And we avoid the question Is this all that it means?

I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?