Glen Duncan Quotes

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

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

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.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope.

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

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

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

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

Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

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

I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.

Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.

Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.

Life is the art of being well deceived.

So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?