Ivan Turgenev Quotes

I think life's an irrational obsession.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

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.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?”

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.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

Every time I wake, I understand how easy it is to be nothing.