Will Durant Quotes

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

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

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

To wonder about life is not something we learn; it is something we forget.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

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

I've never worried about life's big questions.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?

All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.

The lyrics are a lot about those big questions: why are we here, how did we get here, what's the point, and what's next. When those questions come up with fans, I would absolutely share with them what has helped me and where I stand on what it is that I believe.

Life is a question without a standard answer.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.