Existential Meaninglessness Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man ... 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. Logos is deeper than logic. — Viktor E. Frankl

For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky. — Karl Ove Knausgard