Search for Purpose Quotes

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

We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remains—we can't know.

Life is an empty dream.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It's like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it's about nothing—just a jumble.

Life is a question without a standard answer.

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

A man with nothing to die for has even less for which to live.

'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

I've definitely had the long stretches of time in my personal life where I've felt an intense loneliness and a desperation to feel something real and to have something that truly meant something in my life.

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

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.

Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.

... 'I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything's gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it!'. [pp. 84-85]

For me, a spiritual and existential crisis is the same thing in that your foundation gets rocked.

Those who are driven by poverty, those who're free from material worries hunger exhausting labor a joyless existence ask the same question, the question of meaning.