Existential Futility Quotes

Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

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.

Thank God life ends—we'd never survive it. From Big Bang to weary shag, the history of the world. Our flesh is ferocious...our bodies will kill us...our bones will outlive us.

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

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Nos numeros sumus et fruges consumere nati. We are but ciphers, born to consume earth's fruits.

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

Some people were born just so they could be buried.