Okay, so not a thousand, but I'm working on it. Here are some quotations. Some I've carried with me most of my life. Some I've recently mined from the Internet. So, there may be some inaccuracies. I'll work on that too. They speak to me about the apparent meaninglessness encountered in life, the randomness, the challenges of living, and at times the beauty. And, some I just like. The words of Diogenes Laërtius should be read as a disclaimer.
One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.
― Diogenes Laërtius
Every attempt to give objective reality to the billions of years the cosmos supposedly passed through before man appeared, secretly smuggles a human observer into the statement...
― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development
The most as you'll ever go
is back where you used to know
― Rickie Lee Jones
how do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves his porch light on
― Tom Waits
...don't you know there ain't no devil there's just god when he's drunk
― Tom Waits
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
― Stanley Kubrick
Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
― Albert Camus
Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
― Kurt Vonnegut
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
― William Shakespeare
one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
― Frank Zappa
(or maybe Martin Mull)
nothing really mattress
― anonymous graffiti artist
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
― Alan W. Watts
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
― Stanley Kubrick
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long.
― Alan Moore
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
― Charles M. Schulz (Snoopy)
It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.
― Hiromu Arakawa
...Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
― G.K. Chesterton
I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?
― Frank Zappa
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
― Mae West
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
― Umberto Eco
--- or, more likely: ---
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
― G.K. Chesterton
I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
― Søren Kierkegaard
the snow doesn't
give a soft white damn
whom it touches
― E.E. Cummings
Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.
― Thomas Gray
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
― Heraclitus
Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.
Was Rorschach.
Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?
― Alan Moore
Who would survive? That's an interesting question. I would predict... convicts and file clerks.
The worst convicts - those deep down in solitary confinement - and the most ordinary file clerks, probably for large insurance companies, because they would be in fire-proof rooms, protected by tons of the best insulator in the world: paper. And imagine what will happen. The small group of vicious criminals will fight the army of file clerks for the remaining means of life. The convicts will know violence, but the file clerks will know... organization. Who do you think will win?
― Walter Bernstein (screenplay)
(Prof. Groeteschele - Walter Matthau)
(from the novel, Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler)
Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.
― John Patrick
There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.
― Edgar Allan Poe
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
― Mark Twain
Beautiful, beautiful, sad.
― Chester Hill