Ugo Betti Quotes

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?

As much as we'd like to think life is sacred, there's not a lot of evidence for that. The universe is maddeningly casual, giving and taking it.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

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

It's hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It's nice to think there's a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that's not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives.

She was a woman attempting to make some sense of, and get some satisfaction from, a life that seemed to have no more logic than a roulette wheel.

People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don't happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.

All thoughts emit a throw of dice

Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

Maybe life is random, but I doubt it.

I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?

It's a lot like life. I think 99 percent of what goes on in life, we have very little control over.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask why me? Then a voice answers nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.

We have no firm hold on any knowledge or philosophy that can lift us out of our difficulties.

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

Since I came at 'Godot' from a God-based frame of mind, it didn't strike me as absurdist. It struck me as characters waiting for proof of God's existence.

Why does anything ever happen? Some things happen and some don't.

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

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

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.