Bertrand Russell Quotes

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.

I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.

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.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

Death, only, renders hope futile.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

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

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

A life of nothing's nothing worth, From that first nothing ere his birth, To that last nothing under earth.

As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Futility is the defining characteristic of life.

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.

Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!

The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.