Henry Rollins Quotes

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

Nobody wants to have meaninglessness in their lives. You probably see a lot of people living their lives that don't have a whole lot of meaning that you can perceive, and you don't want that for yourself.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

If you can do it then why do it?

I feel like I'm not on Earth just to shake it and shake it endlessly, you know?

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, it is to live as if dead, to let the life within us wither. Toward what goal or achievement are we striving in life? This is the important question to ask ourselves.

If one has a purpose, life is bearable enough, do you not think so?

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

I'm glad the universe is pointless. It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, 'What have you been doing, you idiot? That's not the point!

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

It feels like I am wasting time. I mean, that's always the case. My life doesn't add up to anything.

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.

...the majority of people cannot endure the bareness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

If you see there is no meaning to anything that you are doing, your ego collapses; so you are trying to find all kinds of fake meanings.