Quotes & Sayings About Meaninglessness

The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness. — Martin Esslin

Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness. — Osho

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

A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don't leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn't have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning. — Tao Lin

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

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

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

rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves - and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole. It — Eric Hoffer

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too. — Walter Kirn

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

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

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal. — Paul Bowles

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

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

I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don't remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it's probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light. — Bret Easton Ellis

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

Not even the most hardened nihilist can live in the world of pure meaninglessness that his or her narrative presupposes. In their daily practice, the most ardent religious skeptics have to presuppose a basic order and intelligibility in reality that contradicts the creed of self-creation through random chance. — Michael S. Horton

Today ... no performance can be without its control screen video ... its goal is to be hooked up to itself ... the mirror phase has given way to the video phase. What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doing so, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness. — Jean Baudrillard

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

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis. — Criss Jami

I said that the question about death, and more precisely, the confusion about death, lies at the very heart of human understanding, and in the final analysis, the relation of man to life, that which we call his worldview, is ultimately determined by his relationship to death.
All of civilization seems to be permeated with a passionate obsession to stifle this fear of death and the sense of the meaninglessness of life that oozes out of it like a slow-dripping poison. What is this intense conflict with religion, if nothing other than a mindless attempt to root out of human consciousness the memory and concern with death and consequently the question: why do I live in this brief and fragile life? — Alexander Schmemann

I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness. — E.L. Doctorow

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

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. — Paul Tillich

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

What saves us from succumbing to utter meaninglessness is not reason but instinct. — Marty Rubin

The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning. — John Cage

Consider the possibility that many of the things you hear and say are utter nonsense and meaningless repetitions of noise. — Bryant McGill

Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all. — Marva Dawn

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

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

Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally. Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called 'timelessness' and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad, since there is so much of it. — Ada Louise Huxtable

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

...monotony finds no relief in adding variety or changing our attitude about it. Activity does not create meaning; it is the other way around. — Ravi Zacharias

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

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

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. — Aldous Huxley

The things that people laugh about most are their errors and inadequacies; the difficult challenges that they face such as personal identity, social and sexual relationships, and death; and incongruity, absurdity, and meaninglessness. These are all deeply human concerns and challenges: just as no one has ever seen a laughing dog, so no one has ever heard about a laughing god. — Neel Burton

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

When you're unhappy, you either see nothing at all and the world sinks into meaninglessness, or else you see things preternaturally sharply, and everything suddenly seems to have meaning. Even the most banal things, like a traffic light turning from red to green, can decide whether you turn left or right. — Nicolas Barreau

Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love. — Martin Buber

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

Yes, be different, but not for the vanities of being different. — Criss Jami

Globalization is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity. — Zygmunt Bauman

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

Much of the world believes little or nothing. People are broad but shallow. Agnosticism, anxiety, emptiness, and meaninglessness have gripped much of the world - and even the church ... By contrast, our Pilgrim forebears stand as shining examples of men who were narrow but deep, certain of what they believed, unswerving in their loyalty,
and passionately dedicated to the God they trusted, and for whom they would willingly have died. — Billy Graham

Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you. — Kahlil Gibran

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

History is the nothing people write about a nothing. — William Golding

You wear nice clothes, you seek respect, you make a lot of money, but what's the point? It's all pointless. Of course, this kind of meaninglessness might suit this crappy nation. But, you see, we still have emotions like joy and happiness, right? They may not mount to much. But they fill up our emptiness. That's the only explanation I have. — Koushun Takami

It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices. — Helen Phillips

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

Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial. — Stephen Batchelor

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

If utopia was illusion hypostasized, communism, going still further, will be illusion decreed, imposed: a challenge to the omnipresence of evil, an obligatory optimism. A man will find it hard to accommodate himself to it if he lives, by dint of ordeals and experiments, in the intoxication of disappointment and if, like the author of Genesis, he is reluctant to identify the Age of Gold with the future, with becoming. Not that he scorns the fanatics of "infinite progress" and their efforts to make justice prevail here on earth; but he knows, to his misery, that justice is a material impossibility, a grandiose meaninglessness, the only ideal about which we can declare quite certainly that it will never be realized, and against which nature and society seem to have mobilized all their laws. — Emil Cioran

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

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

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

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

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard. — Tony Kushner

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

The right to or claim on something means nothing more than to do it, or take it or be able to use it without in any way thereby injuring another: simplicity is the sign of the true. This sheds light on the meaninglessness of the same questions, e.g. whether we have the right to take our own life. But as concerns the claims that others could personally have upon us, they rest upon the condition that we are living, and therefore cease if the condition ceases. That the one who no longer wants to live for himself should now continue to live merely as a machine for the use of others is an extravagant demand. — Arthur Schopenhauer

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

The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he's but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other. — M. Scott Peck

Only the myopic magnifying lens of the television camera maintains the demonstration, march, and picketing as a modality of political expression; they have otherwise faded into meaninglessness since the end of the Vietnam War with the shift of urban form and activity. These acts and activities have been displaced over the past decade from the square and main street to the windswept emptiness of City Hall Mall or Federal Building Plaza. To encounter a ragtag mob of protesters in such places today renders them enve more pathetic, their marginality enforced by a physcial displacement into so unimportant, uninhabited, and unloved a civic location. — Trevor Boddy

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

[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

The West, in its pursuit of material abundance, lost its soul, its interiority. Surrounded by meaninglessness, boredom, anguish, it cannot find its own humanity. All the success of science proves to be of no use - because the house is full of things, but the master of the house is missing. In the East, the end result of centuries of considering matter to be illusory and only consciousness to be real has been that the master is alive but the house is empty. It is difficult to rejoice with hungry stomachs, with sick bodies, with death surrounding you; it is impossible to meditate. — Osho

Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature. — David W. Orr

It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater. — Pope Benedict XVI

And Castle nodded sagely. 'So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree more.'
'Do you really agree?' I asked. 'A minute ago you said something about Jesus.'
'Who?' said Castle.
'Jesus Christ?'
'Oh,' said Castle. 'Him.' He shrugged. 'People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.'
'I see.' I knew I wasn't going to have an easy time writing a popular article about him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought and said. — Kurt Vonnegut

One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes. — Sherwood Anderson

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

They pursue meaninglessness until they force it to mean. — Rollo May

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. — Hermann Hesse

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

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

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

Universal meaninglessness gives way to ecstatic inebriation, an orgy of irrationality. Since the world has no meaning, let us live! Without definite aims or accessible ideals, let us throw ourselves into the roaring whirlwind of infinity, follow its tortuous path in space, burn in its flames, love its cosmic madness and total anarchy! To live infinity, as well as to meditate a long time upon it, is the most terrifying lesson in anarchy and revolt one can ever learn. Infinity shakes you to the roots of your being, disorganizes you, but it also makes you forget the petty, the contingent, and the insignificant. — Emil Cioran

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

She described how Camus's aphorism "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" helps her fight back against unproductive feelings of meaninglessness.
If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, we can see that he is smiling. He is content in his task of defying the Gods, the journey more important than the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle, an end, a meaning to the chaos of creation - that's more than any deity seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, even polish it up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.
As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again. Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus! — Fay Weldon

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

Meaninglessness woos us into spending our one shot at life on insignificant and trivial things. If we are not vigilant, we drift from God's glorious ambition for our lives, losing sight of anything remotely grand, trading God-instilled passion for an easier and more often traveled road. And if our hearts aren't awakened by majesty, our lives soon shrink into little bits of nothingness. — Louie Giglio

Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Delayed, unexpressed appreciation is meaningless. The dead need no appreciation. The living do. — Srividya Srinivasan

Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off. — William James

Her heart is played like well worn strings
In her eyes the sadness sings
Of one who was destined of better things — Lang Leav

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

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

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

We, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness. (p184) — Benjamin Hale

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

Either God is real or he isn't; I'm ok with that. — Anonymous

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

During the crash and burn, I began to burn from cranial crown to flat sole, for meaning and understanding. Every concept, psychological perceptions with hardened pathways, everything that registered as inherited from the communal was starting to dissolve into meaninglessness. The foundational tenets, the pre-established belief systems, instilled sustenance systems tended by both family and extended communal began to dissolve, first as trivial, and then as untenable to my being without validation from me. If my life was worth anything, I choose to live the best life for me.
So I entered what I call The Blank State. — Dew Platt

The time you absolutely have to get off your ass and act is when action seems futile — Marty Rubin