W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

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

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

Living's heavy work, but off to one side the way we are, it's useless, too. It don't make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

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.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

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

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

I like to remind myself that everything is meaningless.

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

"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."

..finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush.

The point is there ain't no point.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.