Top 100 Quotes About Meaninglessness
#1. The perceived meaninglessness of work is often part of depression. It usually, however, is a sign of depression rather than a cause. Death.
Edward T. Welch
#2. Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.
Simon Critchley
#3. Many of us feel alone and assaulted by the meaninglessness of what we are doing. But, at such times, we are doing; the problem is not a lack of activity with a point, but rather questions about the point of the activity.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
#4. As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness.
Meghan Daum
#5. Until we see love as the meaning of life, life seems to have no meaning at all. The sense of meaninglessness produces chaos, and the chaos produces fear. There is only one way out of this, and that is to see every moment and every situation as an invitation to love.
Marianne Williamson
#6. It occurs to me that if I don't sort myself out soon I will die of meaninglessness. That is the price of avoiding the things I find troubling.
Kyo Maclear
#7. I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.
E.L. Doctorow
#8. Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind ... Fo r Love not only annihilates our fear of meaninglessness but empowers us to seek the happiness of others. And this indeed is our greatest happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
#9. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable-perhaps everything.-Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung
#10. Acts of violence
Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death
and the meaninglessness of killing.
Dag Hammarskjold
#11. We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!
Anne Rice
#12. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. Life
Andrew Solomon
#13. Sometimes the greatest fear and pain come from a sense of meaninglessness in life. Meaning is a choice, not a search, remember? A sense of meaninglessness is really, therefore, a call to let in higher awareness and truth.
Robert Holden
#14. We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.
Richard Flanagan
#15. Without Christ, I would be what the world desires and praises. Then I would shudder and fade into eternal meaninglessness. No thank you.
Alisa Hope Wagner
#16. 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.
Robert M. Pirsig
#17. That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.
Hans Jonas
#18. There were some things that took life and broke it, not merely into meaninglessness, but with active malice flung the pieces farther, into hell.
Robin McKinley
#19. Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles.
Salman Rushdie
#20. I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
William, Saroyan
#21. It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?
Scarlett Thomas
#22. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Viktor E. Frankl
#23. Anxiety may consist of the loss of psychological or spiritual meaning which is identified with one's existence as a self, i.e., the threat of meaninglessness.
Paul Tillich
#24. She rebelled against the emptiness and meaninglessness of her life. She hoped that when Bruce was her age he too would rebel if he found his life intolerable. She hoped he would want to do something about it; anything was better than to submit to your fate supinely.
Emilie Loring
#25. Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
Errol Morris
#26. The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.
Martin Esslin
#27. Only the wise know folly; fools know neither wisdom nor folly. Just as it takes wisdom to know folly, light to know darkness, it takes profundity to know vanity, meaning to know meaninglessness.
Peter Kreeft
#28. I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. And that is why we find ourselves emptied of meaning with our pantries still full.
Ravi Zacharias
#29. The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of non-being. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith.
Paul Tillich
#30. These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth - a nightmare of meaninglessness without end.
Kurt Vonnegut
#31. 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.
Gueorgui Pinkhassov
#32. They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean.
Rollo May
#33. the flame of belief is fueled inexhaustibly by the fears of death, oblivion, and meaninglessness. Where
Irvin D. Yalom
#34. I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
Hermann Hesse
#35. Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Aldous Huxley
#36. The wordlessness of depression is a galling experience. You can't phone your friends, writing an e-mail is beyond you, you can't put pen to paper. The disease is a crash course in meaninglessness, lack of structure, the collapse of form.
Gwyneth Lewis
#37. The longer children live on the street, the more they realize the meaninglessness of words. They don't say things such as 'Thank you' and 'you are my friend.' They'd rather show through their actions what is inside. It is more difficult for these street kids to speak than to act.
Chi Cheng Huang
#38. She would have pondered over the meaninglessness of silent, austere beauty renewing itself with every sunrise and going ungazed at by half the world.
Harper Lee
#39. Enthusiasm for the universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the universe and for man as its center is alive.
Paul Tillich
#40. We become victims of the great disease of technological society - meaninglessness.
Doris Janzen Longacre
#41. The point is that only one thing matters in this world, to prepare oneself for death. One can try to be as comfortable as possible until one dies ... Because being comfortable does not have any meaning either. It just does not. Everything is only a big meaninglessness that one must bear.
Odd Nerdrum
#42. The problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.
John Green
#43. See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That's what God's love does. If you're beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it's because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you'll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.
Ian McEwan
#44. Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.
G.K. Chesterton
#45. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.
Paul Tillich
#46. It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.
Janet Fitch
#47. Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
#48. I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.
Robert Reich
#49. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive,
Questlove
#50. One can forget the meaninglessness of his own existence by occupying himself with scientific experiments of dubious import. Countless scientists and scholars spend their lives in the search of truths that are irrelevant to them.
John Silber
#51. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
Stanley Kubrick
#52. 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.
Richard L. Purtill
#53. Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning to him. A grinning face that laughed scornfully at all his vain attempts to manage his life.
Henning Mankell
#54. The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
John Cage
#55. But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?
Philip Yancey
#56. What saves us from succumbing to utter meaninglessness is not reason but instinct.
Marty Rubin
#57. ...later she would laugh when she discovered that meaninglessness came from the dark shaft of gloom that surrounded her day and night, and that ecstasy was just a sunny room away.
Kathleen Collins
#58. You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.
C. G. Jung
#59. It is the absoluteness of meaninglessness that Christianity, as I understand it, inhabits and inflects, the shock and stark violence of the cross that discloses the living Christ. Revelation, like creation, arises not merely out of nothingness but by means of it.
Christian Wiman
#60. Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.
Osho
#61. Here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
Joan Didion
#62. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
Stephen Koch
#63. It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139)
Paul Tillich
#64. The future of civilisation depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness that characterizes the thoughts of men today.
Albert Schweitzer
#65. And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God's presence ...
Hermann Hesse
#66. Going through the motions gives you plenty of time to examine the motions. I used to find this interesting. Now it has taken on the taint of meaninglessness.
David Levithan
#67. Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
Walter Kirn
#68. The world was full of holes, tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could walk through, and once you were on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you.
Paul Auster
#69. [Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity.
Pascal Mercier
#70. Namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the existential vacuum.
Viktor E. Frankl
#71. A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. Men court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom, to be relieved of fear and frustration.
Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferre
#72. My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.
Hayden Carruth
#73. Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#74. Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
#75. The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning ... And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!
Pierre Anthon
Janne Teller
#76. We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#77. Consider the possibility that many of the things you hear and say are utter nonsense and meaningless repetitions of noise.
Bryant McGill
#78. Yes, be different, but not for the vanities of being different.
Criss Jami
#79. People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Chad Harbach
#80. When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect - designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.
H.P. Lovecraft
#81. The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness.
William Barrett
#82. Many things that don't really mean so much of anything, are wonderful.
C. JoyBell C.
#83. Where are we headed? Are we not endlessly plunging - backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there an up and a down anymore? Do we not wander as if through an endless nothingness? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Hasn't it grown colder?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. But here's how it works: when the world has told you once too often and once and for all that you are nothing nothing nothing then you come to the conclusion that others may be nothing too.
J.W. Horton
#86. I have finally figured out the meaning of life: there's no such thing. And that's a beautiful thing, because that means that WE get to choose it ourselves. Life has no meaning besides the meaning you give it. You are indeed the author of your destiny. So why not write a book worth reading?
Dean Bokhari
#87. One explains things until things have no meaning anymore.
Marty Rubin
#88. Her heart is played like well worn strings
In her eyes the sadness sings
Of one who was destined of better things
Lang Leav
#90. Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.
Judith Guest
#91. And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words ... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan W. Watts
#92. Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.
Kahlil Gibran
#93. The time you absolutely have to get off your ass and act is when action seems futile
Marty Rubin
#94. Either God is real or he isn't; I'm ok with that.
Anonymous
#95. Just tell me why; why the fucking why?" To which the universe would hollowly respond, "My ways cannot be known, oh man." Which is to say, "My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.
Philip K. Dick
#96. Life is what you make it and legacy is what you leave it. Stop trying to be perfect, stop waiting for perfection to find you, and start making your environment a product of you instead of the other way around.
A.J. Darkholme
#97. Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#99. If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.
Ben Shahn
#100. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
Aldous Huxley
