Phil Ochs Quotes

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life.

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt.

The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.

Life is a question without a standard answer.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

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

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

I like the big questions.

Life is a horizontal fall.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.

One of my favorite books is 'Man's Search for Meaning.'

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.

Life is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope; and I take it to my breast.

Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

Those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The necessary premise is that a person is somehow more than his or her "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases us to call "My Life." We have grounds to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.

As long as you and I are still breathing, we have a purpose to serve

Yesterday you asked me what the purpose of life is. I've thought about that ever since. I think it's to do good no matter what life throws at you, to not let the pain turn you bitter. It's something we have to learn, something we have to make ourselves become...Little kids don't have to learn it. They already know.

To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.

Without literature, life is hell.