Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

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

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

I do find that I tend to write about big questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How do we relate to each other?

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

I kind of feel, in a way, all of us will forever be asking those questions of ourselves: Who am I and how do I fit in in the world and what is all this about? Because those aren't really... there are no answers to those questions, in a sense.

Who does understand life?

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

One of my favorite books is 'Man's Search for Meaning.'

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?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,and I intend to end up there. Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

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.

The purpose of life is life.

I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.