Quotes About Meaninglessness

It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed... the thing more inconceivable than one's death--never to have been born...

Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial.

Shit don't mean shit

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

The notable thing about his story here is not its atheism but its fatalism. The drama that it presents of helpless humans enslaved by a callous fate-figure is, of course, not new and, like all such myths, it conveys not just meaninglessness but a positive, sinister meaning – the presence of an active oppressor.

The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.

Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers

Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.

many so-called mental and emotional illnesses are really symptoms of an underlying sense of meaninglessness or emptiness.

mental and emotional illnesses are really symptoms of an underlying sense of meaninglessness or emptiness. Logotherapy eliminates that emptiness by helping the individual to detect his unique meaning, his mission in life. Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity.

Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision. No future.

We determine what is good, what is bad, what ought to be, and what ought not to be- all out of our inclinations of mind. But we seldom recognize the total relativity- the total meaninglessness – of all our defining. We don't see that it's through our obsession with meaning that we create meaninglessness.

I]t's through our obsession with meaning that we create meaninglessness.

We engage in conceptualising to clarify, to understand, to find certitude. (…) [W]e go nowhere with this process[.] … [W]e teach uncertainty, doubt, and meaninglessness to our children, all in the name of 'truth' … [I]t just goes on, generation after generation, the continuation of greed, anger, and ignorance.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.

we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness,

Words had lost their meaning; even war was no longer war. Monteron would tum in his grave if he could hear what they called war nowadays. After all, peace was no longer peace.

When we separate our spiritual self from our life in the world, we create a kind of inner schism that leads to a sense of meaninglessness and isolation in our "secular" life.

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.