Quotes About Meaninglessness

So the very first step on the path to blessedness is to be confronted by the spectre of meaninglessness… by inner discontent, sadness, anxiety, regret, frustration, depression. Confucius put it succinctly: "No vexation, no enlightenment; no anxiety, no illumination." (Analects 7:8)

I would miss him. He always made so little sense.

I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything, couldn't do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.

The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can turn one into a slave if one does not run away from it, and then one is doomed to repeat oneself.

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck.

What would it have mattered? What does any of it matter? You don't have to look at me like that! I'm not mad! I know what's going on . . . we'd all of us be better dead!' There was a long silence; then Shahid, grimly, said: 'I expect, very soon, we all shall be.

If Christianity is to be discounted as wishful thinking because it removes fear of meaninglessness and annihilation, then secularism should be open to the same charge, since it removes the hated ideas of an absolute superior and of real responsibility.

Strangely, the best can come from this neglected quarter. We will go to almost any length to avoid this painful paradox; but in that refusal we only confine ourselves to the useless experience of contradiction. Contradiction brings the crushing burden of meaninglessness. One can endure any suffering if it has meaning; but meaninglessness is unbearable. Contradiction is barren and destructive, yet paradox is creative. It is a powerful embracing of reality.

He was a man who had already died once. There was no reason why he should feel any sense of responsibility or attachment to the world. To him, it was nothing more than a sheet of newspaper covered in the scribblings of cockroaches.

Hanio believed that his ideas were all rooted in meaninglessness and they blossomd into life at the very moment when meaning was created. For that reason, he never once initiated any action on the grounds that it was meaningful. People who ascribe meaning to their actions ended up staring meaninglessness in the face, in a state of frustration and hopelessness.

Thousands of years before our liberal age, ancient Buddhism went further by denying not just all cosmic dramas, but even the inner drama of human creation. The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That's the truth. Get over it.

According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don't need to create any meaning. They just need to realise that there is no meaning, and thus be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena.

Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won't be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

when you see everything, you realize that nothing means anything

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.

globalization is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity.

I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.

The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.