David Levithan Quotes

I searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

..finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

Maybe life isn't meaningless...Maybe just YOUR life is meaningless

I wonder if anyone will ever know the emptiness of my life. Personal Diary -- Last entry Oh whats the point?

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

One cannot be a part-time nihilist.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

She was a woman attempting to make some sense of, and get some satisfaction from, a life that seemed to have no more logic than a roulette wheel.

The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.