e. e. cummings Quotes

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

The true artform is being a human being.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.

I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions.

All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.