Nathaniel Branden Quotes

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

Just as I do not know where I came from, so I do not know where I am going. All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall forever into oblivion, or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of the two will be my lot for eternity. Such is my state of mind, full of weakness and uncertainty. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of trying to find out what is going to happen to me.

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance, we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.

And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?

You can get into a place in your life where you no longer are in control of events, and events are in control of you.

Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.

It is so easy to exist instead of live.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

My favorite word is existentialism. I can't say it and I'm not quite sure what it means.

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

Coincidence exists, but believing in it never did me any good.

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

Life is like a long ride to nowhere in particular.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.