Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

Everything I do is somehow rooted in humanity. It's always about people; it's always about ego. It's always about desperation. It's quite existential. You know, 'Am I leading a good life?' That might be because I'm an atheist, and I think this is all we've got, so you better be nice. And have fun.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

God is dead, and no one cares! If there is a hell I'll see you there!

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.

God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.

God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

I think Bergman's films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.

All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.

We're either nothing or a God's regret.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.