W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Because our choices are largely based on survival. But if life is eternal, life is not a question.

I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

Does life have any meaningful purpose?

It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

We are not born to survive. Only 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.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

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

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

What is the value of your existence?

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.

If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory;

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?

I love the idea of a very simple 8-bit video game character struggling with the complex question: 'isn't there more to life than the role I've been assigned?'

Love life more than the meaning of it?

Madness. I did not get myself born to die. I have better things to do.