Rajneesh Quotes

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

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

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

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

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

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.

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

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.

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.