Life is an empty dream.
A busy life is a wasted life.
I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.
It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.
But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?" "Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.
Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn -or answer the call of Death's dark horn. Without a gleaning of purpose in life, we have no vision, we live in strife, -or let blood fall on a suicide knife.
A man with nothing to die for has even less for which to live.
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.
Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive.
What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.
... people don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.
It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
Out of all the ridiculous religion stories - which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous - the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah, there's this big, giant universe, and it's expanding, and it's all going to collapse on itself, and we're all just here, just 'cuz. Just 'cuz.' That to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.
These messages that we are sending our kids and the kind of lives people lead today so superficial it seems, just a lot of phony stuff. What does it mean when you really stop and think about it's kind of stupid.
What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial - or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.
I lived," Dor said, "but I was not alive.
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.
It does seem terribly unfair that such thousands of people are born and live and die with no past to regret and no future to look forward to.
Eleanor Roosevelt referred to this quotation in her column of June 8, 1936.
Love is the Water of Life Everything other than love for the most beautiful God is agony of the spirit, though it be sugar- eating. What is agony of the spirit? To advance toward death without seizing hold of the Water of Life.
A life without purpose is like a novel without a plot. It wanders all over the place, is hard to follow, and in the end, doesn't get particularly good reviews.
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.