Loss of Purpose Quotes

[For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

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.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.

Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

You go from being with the guys all the time in the locker room, in practice, having a militarized brain in terms of this schedule, and then, all of a sudden, you are on your own. You lose a sense of purpose; you lose a sense of yourself. And you lose confidence. You find yourself saying, 'I was the best at this, and now I'm not the best.'

Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.

I feel like I could be likened to an old hound circling on a rug for the last five years.

To live a life half dead, a living death.

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

What's happened to broadcasting is that broadcasting really used to be... it used to have a very clear public service quotient. And it's more or less now. And it's been lost.

Men died as she watched, and they didn't care about what they had fought for.

Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.

There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.

[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Not working makes you ill, sad, depressed. It ages you.

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

When some people retire, it's going to be mighty hard to be able to tell the difference.

I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.

When you lose work, the meaning and purpose of life are taken away from you, and isolation can set in.