Jean Rostand Quotes

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

But whate'er I am, nor I nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased 'til he be eased With being nothing.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

I've jokingly said that everything I'm doing now is filling up the hours before I die, but I do feel that slightly. I have no religious beliefs so this is the ride. This is it. So I'm just like anyone, I suppose, trying to fill out the days in the most interesting way possible.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

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.

I searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

Every time I wake, I understand how easy it is to be nothing.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

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?

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.