Meaninglessness Quotes

“And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.”

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”says the Teacher.“Utterly meaningless!Everything is meaningless.”What do people gain from all their laborsat which they toil under the sun?Generations come and generations go,but the earth remains forever.The sun rises and the sun sets,and hurries back to where it rises.The wind blows to the southand turns to the north;round and round it goes,ever returning on its course.All streams flow into the sea,yet the sea is never full.To the place the streams come from,there they return again.All things are wearisome,more than one can say.The eye never has enough of seeing,nor the ear its fill of hearing.What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again;there is nothing new under the sun.Is there anything of which one can say,“Look! This is something new”?It was here already, long ago;it was here before our time.No one remembers the former generations,and even those yet to comewill not be rememberedby those who follow them.”

“A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.”

“The paramount terror that plagues humankind is to live a meaningless life of an exile, an incomplete person whom fails to experience the rapture of living in an astonishing manner.”

“As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”

“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.”

“You will never win an unfair competition since the reward is meaningless.”

“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.”

“Death is only tragic if you have tragically wasted your life on meaninglessness.”

“What saves us from succumbing to utter meaninglessness is not reason but instinct.”