Norman Mailer Quotes

Pain is a beautiful thing. When you feel pain, you know you're alive.

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

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell, Remembrance fallen from heaven, And Madness risen from hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.

One thing about pain: It proves you're alive.

Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive.

Man is a piece of the universe made alive

How do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living...No sensible answer can be given to the question...because the question does not make any sense.

Do you qualify to be alive or is the limit of your senses so as to survive?

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.

Human life must be some form of mistake.

I think i'm just breathing, that's all. And there's a difference between breathing and being alive.

Sometimes, pain is all that lets you know you're alive.

If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about.

It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.