Jacques Monod Quotes

Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Will none wipe the sneer off the face of the cosmos?

I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.

If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance , then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillable and thus meaningless.

Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.

As much as we'd like to think life is sacred, there's not a lot of evidence for that. The universe is maddeningly casual, giving and taking it.

Maybe life is random, but I doubt it.

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once he might have believed it to be the work of Providence but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.

Insect politics, indifferent universe. Bang your head against the wall, but apathy is worse.

Everything happens as though I were only one of the particular existences of some great incomprehensible and central being.... Sometimes this great totality of life appears to me so dramatically beautiful that it plunges me into ecstasy. But more often it seems like a monstrous beast that penetrates and surpasses me and which is everywhere, within me and outside me.... And terror grips and envelops me more powerfully from moment to moment.... My only way out is to write, to make others aware of it, so as not to have to feel all of it alone, to get rid of however small a portion of it.

As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

"Tell me, Tool, what dominates your thoughts?" The Imass shrugged before replying. "I think of futility, Adjunct." "Do all Imass think about futility?" "No. Few think at all." "Why is that?" The Imass leaned his head to one side and regarded her. "Because, Adjunct, it is futile."

It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.

Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe. 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.

They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.

How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: The Renaissance pencilled in for right after the Dark Ages. The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Post-Modern Era, then The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.