Charles Mackay Quotes

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

To me death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's cursed.

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 be, or not to be, that is the question.

We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!

The lot of man - to suffer and to die.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.

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

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

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.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.

Life is an incurable disease.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

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

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.