Search for Significance Quotes

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush.

There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away.

I'm so fascinated by the human longing for meaning. The way we relate romantically to each other is so much to do with our longing for meaning as well.

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards. Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it. A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples, some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

The need to find meaning...is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

I felt invisible in my family, and I wanted to be significant like my brothers were significant. I wanted my parents to pay attention, so I went out into the world with that driving me, that grasping, that seeking validation.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

What am I doing, just playing basketball? It was eating at me. Because basketball, you play, you retire, you're done. I wanted to do something more.

What else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone?

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.