Quotes & Sayings About A Meaningless Life

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house ... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place ... and that's what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That's where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we're no longer human at all, not really. — Rebecca McNutt

You fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning. — Italo Calvino

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer. — Oscar Wilde

collectivity, on the other hand, is the place of what the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal calls "divertissement," an untranslatable word which roughly means "distraction" or "diversion": It is the escape from life's problems, and also its invitations, into activities that in ultimate terms are meaningless. It is a constant turning to superficial actions as a way to avoid facing the true realities of human life. The soap operas and situation comedies easily become an addiction. They take the place of the "bread and circuses" of ancient Rome. There was plenty wrong with Roman society and the Roman emperors offered the diversion of food and entertainment to make people forget the banality and meaninglessness of the lives they lived. Our society does much the same and has ever so much more in the way of sophisticated tools for doing so. — William H. Shannon

Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power. CIX — W. Somerset Maugham

Your life would never have a meaning if you don't have a goal or purpose — Sunday Adelaja

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence. — Harold Rosenberg

We're on this planet for too short a time. And at the end of the day, what's more important? Knowing that a few meaningless figures balanced - or knowing that you were the person you wanted to be? — Sophie Kinsella

Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, I'd feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I'm deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn't accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we're sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning. — Colin Wilson

The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted. — Gary Inbinder

What meaning our lives seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing. We may have memories that are unlike those of anyone else, but without the proper emotions to liven those memories they might as well reside in a computer file as disconnected bits of data that never unite into a tailor-made individual for whom things seem to mean something. You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody. — Thomas Ligotti

And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? 'Life', certainly. But 'liberty'? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree. — Yuval Noah Harari

Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless. — Bertrand Russell

A purposeless and goalless life is meaningless — Sunday Adelaja

... and the rest of his life lay in front of him like a barren, meaningless postscript. — Lev Grossman

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless. — Emil Cioran

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end. — Lewis Mumford

A life without purpose is meaningless — Sunday Adelaja

Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy.
In the end, all you get is a few words. — Scott Nicholson

The moment I realized that God existed, I knew that I could not do otherwise than to live for him alone ... Faith strips the mask from the world and reveals God in everything. It makes nothing impossible and renders meaningless such words as anxiety, danger, and fear, so that the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy- like a child, hand in hand with his mother. — Charles De Foucauld

I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life. — Corazon Cojuangco Aquino

It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job with the meaning of your life. — Sam Keen

The Myth of Sisyphus makes us wonder if we too are like the ones who are so distracted making friends with important people, staying on top of the latest technology, getting good marks in school, and making lots of money, that we never pause to think:

What are we actually living for?

Sisyphus ended up opening his heart to questions of meaning, value and purpose. He himself decided it was best to just make the most of his short time on earth, however meaningless it all may be. Through Sisyphus, Camus is telling us that life is a joke, and the courageous ones will accept that and have a laugh along the way. I know many movies released these days that operate under the same premise. — Jon Morrison

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble.
The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love.
But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death. — Milan Kundera

Without a dream, life is meaningless. — Sunday Adelaja

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156 — Chuck Klosterman

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. — Leo Tolstoy

Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them. — Harry Guntrip

I also made two very important discoveries as time went on. In the first place, I discovered that making money was easy. I had been led to believe that money and possessions would insure me a life of happiness and peace of mind. So that was the path I pursued. In the second place, I discovered that making money and spending it foolishly was completely meaningless. I knew that this was not what I was here for, but at that time I didn't know exactly what I was here for. — Peace Pilgrim

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night, they're full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things — Fernando Pessoa

Albert Camus introduced his philosophy of the absurd, in which man searches for meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world. In this context, Camus proposed that the only real question in philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide. (He concluded that one should not commit suicide; instead, one should live to revolt against the absurd life, even though it will always be without hope. — David Eagleman

Everybody knows how awful the world is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things, others with sports, money, love, art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way. — Woody Allen

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

We should never, never be afraid or ashamed about dreams. The dreams won't all come true; we won't always make it; but where there is no vision a people perish. Where people have no dreams and no hopes and aspirations, life becomes dull and a meaningless wilderness. — Tommy Douglas

Without prolonged moments of adoration, of prayerful encounter with the word, of sincere conversation with the Lord, our work easily becomes meaningless; we lose energy as a result of weariness and difficulties, and our fervor dies out. The Church urgently needs the deep breath of prayer, and to my great joy groups devoted to prayer and intercession, the prayerful reading of God's word and the perpetual adoration of the Eucharist are growing at every level of ecclesial life. — Pope Francis

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement. — Lewis Mumford

she described in a separate paragraph the Haredi community, and how within it religious practice was a total way of life. The distinction between what was rendered to Caesar and what to God was meaningless, much as it was for observant Muslims. — Ian McEwan

Nothing (at least that can be done by humans) immortalizes anyone. The Fault in Our Stars will hopefully have a long and wonderful life, but it will eventually go out of print, and eventually the last person ever to read it will die, and then the characters will no longer live in any consciousness.Also, that is okay. That is good, actually. That is how it should be. One of the things the characters in this novel have to grapple with is the reality of temporaryness. What Gus in particular must reconcile himself to is that being temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless. — John Green

The theater of the absurd represented a contrast to realistic theater. Its aim was to show the lack of meaning in life in order to get the audience to disagree. The idea was not to cultivate the meaningless. On the contrary. But by showing and exposing the absurd in ordinary everyday situations, the onlookers are forced to seek a truer and more essential life for themselves. — Jostein Gaarder

People realize that a life that had seemed enjoyable (travel, social life, romance) and fulfilling (work) was actually empty and meaningless. So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they want you to share the riches, the pleasures, the joys. Or so they claim. I suspect that hey just want to share and spread the misery. (The knowledge that someone is at liberty or has escaped makes the pain of incarceration doubly hard to bear). Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life 'meaning' is the one to which I am most hostile
apart from all the others (201). — Geoff Dyer

All sens of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story, they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond intercepting the odd squirt of sperm that would otherwise have troubled a respectable wife, she might as well be dead. Yet, she exists, and, against the odds, she is happy. — Michel Faber

Outbox and its inherent transient nature - is it a take on life itself ? momentary, independent, fleeting and somewhat meaningless dwelling for all creations on their way out - to sent items. — Sunil Raina

The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. — Greta Christina

Often-times, grass was more useful than gold. Man was more desirable than a beast. Chance was more seductive than knowledge, and eternal life was completely meaningless without love. — Amy Harmon

My books have all been very deeply felt. You don't spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I've been serious. But I don't do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don't write book reviews. I don't sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don't go to writer conferences. I don't teach writing seminars. I don't hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I'm not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I'm not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don't think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don't think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There's no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me. — Bret Easton Ellis

If the true God is not allowed to lead our lives society will continue to immerse itself into bad decision, poor planning and selfishness on all levels. This will lead to a world-wide revolution that will fuel more meaningless wars, injustice, horrific crimes, lost of life and what really matters the most, hope for the future. A love that could warms hearts. A trust that would never betray a brother or a friend. A peace that the world has never seen. — Delaine Robins

I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking ALL movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is THEIR lives are meaningless. — Donald Miller

I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless. — Hari Kunzru

If you can find a drug more powerful than love I will tie my hand with chains get on my knees and give you my life because at that moment my life is meaningless — Gabriel Sanchez

You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. — Eckhart Tolle

When you give meaning to even the most meaningless of things around you, you will always stand to be taught something new, have what you already know reinforced, or be reminded of what you've forgotten. — A.J. Darkholme

Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and it's quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. — Ray Bradbury

She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and and in one clot right out of my life too, and as result I'm sure I was like a stranger to her as well. Our individual pain was so great that that we could not recognize any other. — Russell Banks

Without death,' he answered, 'life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it? — Seth Grahame-Smith

"I might be entertaining the idea of tamping down my nihilism. Just a bit. Not because life is not meaningless - I think that's inarguable. It's just that the constant awareness of its pointlessness is exhausting. I wouldn't mind being oblivious again. I'd love to feel the wind in my face and think, just for minute, that I'm not going to crash into the rocks."
"You're saying you'd like to be happy. — Daryl Gregory

After you have suffered great losses and known much pain, it is not cowardice to wish to live henceforth with a minimum of suffering. And one form of heroism, about which few if any films will be made, is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness is justified, having the strength to persevere even when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless. — Dean Koontz

A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough. — Jeanette Winterson

Even if we don't want to admit it, the ability to overcome most obstacles is within our hands. We can't blame family, society, or history if our work is meaningless, dull, or stressful. Admittedly, there are not too many options when we realize that our job is useless, or actually harmful. Perhaps the only choice is to quit as quickly as possible, even at the cost of severe financial hardship. In terms of the bottom line of one's life, it is always a better deal to do something one feels good about than something that may make us materially comfortable but emotionally miserable. Such decisions are notoriously difficult, and require great honesty with oneself. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Life is empty. Life is meaningless. When we take a life, we arn't taking anything of value. Wetboys are killers. Thats all we do. Thats all we are. There are no poets in the bitter business. — Brent Weeks

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point. — Mason Cooley

The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, aggression, and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full. — Robert Moss

Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It's like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it's about nothing - just a jumble. — P.G. Wodehouse

Art is a criticism of society and life, and I believe that if life became perfect, art would be meaningless and cease to exist. — Naguib Mahfouz

If we were all looking for something 'easy come and easy go', then all of our lives would be easy. The problem is that we look for something real, don't we? And it is this longing for what is real, that makes finding the right person to be the most difficult task in the world. You can marry someone and promise the rest of your life to the person, only to find out later that this person makes you feel lonely. If we had no innate longing for true love and for true partnership, then none of us would have any problems! Therefore, the most frightening question to ponder upon, is, 'what if true love does not exist; what if the real stuff isn't real at all?' In such a case, life would be meaningless. I suppose I would rather believe in love relentlessly, than live in this world meaninglessly. — C. JoyBell C.

Intellectuals seemed to think that their life - the life of the mind, the endless self examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people. Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdraw from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.
In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasantly about them. — Orson Scott Card

The moment I realized God existed, I knew that I could not do othewise than to live for Him Alone ... Faith strips the mask from the world and renders meaningless such words as anxiety, danger and fear, so the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy
like a child, hand and hand with his mother. — Charles De Foucauld

The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. — Sharon Salzberg

More powerful than drugs, than God or death or fear itself, are stories. With less instinct than any flatworm, we look for them to tell us what to do, how to behave, how we're going to end up. There're plenty of atheists in foxholes, but none without a personal mythology that gives them meaning. When life seems long and meaningless, stories make it short and exciting, make every accident into a test, into enemy action, into a Plot. — Anonymous

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself. — William Barrett

Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that's nothing to worry about. Perhaps we can recognise it and just go on as before. — Thomas Nagel

There are many things that you can avoid by just knowing something. Knowledge of self is the most notable knowledge I pursue. By knowing myself, I avoided dead dreams and a meaningless life. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

So, Nietzsche said, "Life is meaningless, but have courage anyway." Jesus also called His people to be courageous in the face of difficulty, adversity, and hostility, but He did not call them to a groundless courage. As we know, Jesus told His disciples, "Take heart" (John 16:33), or, as some translations put it, "Be of good cheer." However, He did not simply tell them to take heart for the sake of taking heart. He gave them a reason why they ought to have a sense of confidence and assurance for the Christian life. He said, "Take heart; I have overcome the world. — R.C. Sproul

A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization. — Matthew Woodring Stover

The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair. It, too, was like life
and as meaningless. — Stella Gibbons

One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in "spirit" was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped. — Paul Tillich

My expectations from the university were perhaps too idealistic. I had dreams of learning things about innovation and discovery in the field of technology, but all of it hit the ground hard, when I faced with the pathetic reality of the so-called higher education system. To my surprise, I found myself stuck behind the walls of meaningless facts, figures and rankings. It occurred to me that, it was not actually a place for education, rather it was a place where you go to get your head filled with useless undigested information, that you'd probably never use throughout your entire life. It was not education, and moreover, it was definitely not science. — Abhijit Naskar

He had come into the autumn of his life: a man had his seasons, even as had the earth. Was the harvesting of autumn less important than the seeding of spring? Each without the other was meaningless. — Irving Stone

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is. — Neal Stephenson

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. — Kurt Vonnegut

I don't think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,' he said gravely. He hesitated. 'It's very difficult to put into words. The moment you try you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself: "Who am I that I should bother myself about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it's only because I'm a conceited prig. Wouldn't it be better to follow the beaten track and let what's coming to you come?" And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun,and he's lying dead; it's all so cruel and meaningless. It's hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there's any sense to it or whether it's all a tragic blunder of blind fate. — W. Somerset Maugham

Life. It's like a snow globe. From the outside it can look pretty, idyllic, calm. But in reality it's a sham. Look closely inside and you'll see everything is fake, plastic, very small and very, very meaningless. And then every now and again some bastard comes along and shakes the whole lot up. — Keith Nixon

Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches at all hours of the day and night. They deliberately shunned anything good - girls, sports, feasting and family life. — Ken Follett

What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships
especially your your relationships. — Rick Yancey

Without death, life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told.A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish? - Henry, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — Seth Grahame-Smith

Meaningless is a life without love — Anonymous

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. On — Liu Cixin

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

God doesn't want meaningless gifts. In fact, God doesn't need your gifts. He doesn't need your weekly tithe. He doesn't need you to help your neighbor shovel. He doesn't need anything from you. But He wants your heart. He loves you. He doesn't want you to feel obligated to do something for Him, but if you love Him, you will want to do things for Him. You'll want to serve, to help, to live your life with open hands. The gifts you present won't be meaningless - they will be out of love. It will be a sweet aroma to God and He will be pleased. Not because you're following a routine but because you're pouring out love. — Tania Goody

." the Noween bellows with furious force: "Nooo! IT HAS TO BE DONE NOOOW!" The Noween hates children, because children refuse to accept the Noween's lie that time is linear. Children know that time is just an emotion, so "now" is a meaningless word to them, just as it was for Granny. George used to say that Granny wasn't a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist, and the only religion she believed in was Do-It-Later-Buddhism. The Noween brought the fears to the Land-of-Almost-Awake to catch children, because when a Noween gets hold of a child it engulfs the child's future, leaving the victim helpless where it is, facing an entire life of eating now and sleeping now and tidying up right away. Never again can the child postpone something boring till later and do something fun in the meantime. All that's left is now. A fate far worse than death, — Fredrik Backman

Life to most Greeks may be either tragic or comic or a mixture of both; but one thing it never is - and that is, meaningless. — Helen Clark MacInnes

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. — Peter Matthiessen

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.
— John H. Groberg

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian. — Brennan Manning

The born-again Christian sees life not as a blurred , confused, meaningless mass, but as something planned and purposeful. — Billy Graham

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion - romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless. — Robert C. Solomon

You're running out of tomorrows.
Running out of tomorrows, I repeated to myself in my room, sprawling across my bed to begin another midnight marathon of homework. Sometimes I felt as if there were no tomorrows, that everything, my whole life, was crammed into one long day. A continuous stretch of meaningless time. Sometimes I even wished there was no tomorrow, if this was all I had to look forward to. (Chapter.10) — Julie Anne Peters

There's a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are "making a living". No, they're not. They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful. — Adrian Tan

My life had indeed become meaningless to me. Even lack of sleep was not a concern for me; only hunger remained a sensation worthy of articulation. Once that hunger was assuaged, I would return to my inert state. — Ashokamitran

This is not about the mere extension of life along a horizontal plane, but about the deepening of life along a vertical plane. Mere longevity cannot render life meaningful any more than brevity has the power to make it meaningless. — Peter Rollins

We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die. — David Gemmell