Thom Gunn Quotes

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.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?

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.

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

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

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.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

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

It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

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.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

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

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

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

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

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