Hans Jonas Quotes

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Well, life is dark, isn't it? Mostly, it's dreadful. At the same time, death is funny too. I mean, look at the fuss we make of it.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

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.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

Life is an incurable disease.

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

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

I don’t know. We’ll all be dead.

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

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

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

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.

Let's learn to live, for we must die alone.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.

The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.