Existentialism Meaninglessness Quotes & Sayings

If getting on the radio was a major motivation, I'd be one of the worst writers of all time. I admire people who do it, and I think it's a nice way to work, but I try to do the best I can and write what I like. I don't worry about it. — Randy Newman

Recognizing that people's reactions don't belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you've created, terrific. If people ignore what you've created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you've created, don't sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you've created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest - as politely as you possibly can - that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up ... It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work ... I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working. — Anton Chekhov

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents. — William Barrett

I decided to give up meaningless sex, but then I remembered that everything is meaningless. — Oli Anderson

Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war. — Bernard Baruch

Poetry is not a lost art. Poetry is better than ever. Of course you've got the usual gang of idiots (as the Mad magazine staff writers used to call themselves) hiding in the thickets, folks who have gotten pretension and genius all confused, but there are also many brilliant practitioners of the art out there. Check the literary magazines at your local bookstore, if you don't believe me. For every six crappy poems you read, you'll actually find one or two good ones. And that, believe me, is a very acceptable ratio of trash to treasure. The — Stephen King

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home. — Kobo Abe