Quotes About Meaning

Is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?

it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified .

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us.

Without music, life would be a mistake.. I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.

there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.

Everything in proximity to the hero becomes tragedy; everything in proximity to the demigod becomes satyr-play; and everything in proximity to God becomes...what? world perhaps?

Life no argument. - We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

thou great star! what would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

To leave is to suffer,to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

This is the antinomy: insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.

The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity; and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke. Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude. Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?