Robert E. Sherwood Quotes

They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

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.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

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.

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.

Nothing matters. Nothing matters.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

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

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

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

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

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