Carolyn Gold Heilbrun Quotes

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

Success is being nothing but a quote.

The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.

How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

Life would have been absolutely empty without imagination.

All tongue, without either head or heart.’

Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness.

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and exhilaration.

Life is not a tour of gas stations.

Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

I don't want to be empty on the inside.

If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

There is no purpose in living where there is nothing to do.

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Without meaning, without substance, without aim: a mere 'public opinion'.

If you have no goals you will be bored: you will be unhappy because you are empty.

It's just that... without the memories it's all meaningless.

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!

Pleasure without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness.

I certainly won't have an empty life!

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.

Strength is an empty shell.