Quotes About Life

Nihilism: Negativity as an approach to philosophy and life. Various types of Nihilism range from negating the existence of everything to negating the possibility of knowing anything to just negating social and political mores and morality in general. Not a reassuring philosophy. Always reminds me of King Lear's line, "Nothing will come of nothing.

Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure." —GIACOMO LEOPARDI, ITALIAN POET AND PHILOSOPHER (1798–1837), PESSIMIST

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?" —ADAM PHILLIPS, BRITISH PSYCHOANALYST AND PHILOSOPHER (1954–), FREUDIAN EXISTENTIALIST

First, we exist, and next, we create ourselves.

And therein lies a realization I had recently: Even in my darkest moments, I cannot think of my daughter's life or my granddaughter's life as meaningless. Their mere existence feels meaningful to me whenever I think about them. How could such vital and beautiful creatures possibly be insignificant? Yes, these are the sentimental thoughts of an old codger, but do take note, Teacher.

I felt that I was finally facing a fundamental fact of life: that everything is transient and loss is inevitable; that is just the way it is. Since most of the time I try to ignore this immutable fact, finally embracing it bore the sweetness of embracing Truth. And embracing that truth, painful as it is, can make me feel more authentically alive.

Meaninglessness in philosophical nihilism covers a wide spectrum, ranging from Metaphysical Nihilism, a negation of all existence, to Moral and Political Nihilism, a negation of a society's values and laws in a world that we acknowledge exists but has the potential to be better. In this last sense, it is easy to see how breaking away from the inherited truths of society, governments, and religion can make life more enjoyable in an old-fashioned, hedonistic sort of way.

I live with the fact that I don't know if there really is any meaningful cosmic order and, God knows, that is a continual frustration. But I don't understand why it should be any more frustrating to know that there is a grand design but I am unable to understand it. In both cases, I am in the cosmic dark.

Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.

When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.

Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.

Companionship was at the top of Epicurus's list of life's pleasures. He wrote, 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting. Enter boredom. A bored man even longs for longing. He has time to fill, but there is nothing compelling to do.

This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.

The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create.

When all is said and done, this Existentialist precept resonates with me more than any other philosophy of life I know. The idea that life's meaning is not something to look for but something to create myself feels right to me. In fact, it seems absolutely essential.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy." You have to love those words "very miserable"; Schopenhauer could not be content with simply saying "unhappy" as Epicurus did.

Epicurus said something similar when he wrote, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

The image of God is not like an image permanently stamped on a coin; it is more like an image reflected in a mirror. That is, human beings are created for life in relationships that mirror or correspond to God's own life in relationship.

Watch a mother with her baby— and care for the world with the totality of that love. Watch the river . . . the way it flows and effortlessly passes over the little impediments that get in its way. That is the way to walk through life, unencumbered by the small challenges that happen every day.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.

When you're young you say, "If I become a vegetable, pull the plug!" You get older, you hedge a little. "If I'm a turnip, kill me. If I'm a trendier vegetable, like radicchio, mist me twice a day and trim the wilted leaves."

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.40 And occasionally dead.