"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
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"We are all negligible, microscopic insects of a moment; waifs astray in infinity, born yesterday and doomed to perish tomorrow for all time. We have no reason to ask the trite questions of “whence, whither, and why”, for it is only our finite, subjective, rudimentary intellects which conjure up the notion of cosmic purpose. According to all the evidence we can command, we came from chaos and will return to chaos; drifting in a blind mechanical cycle devoid of anything like a goal or object."
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"Of course the ultimate basis of every human act is selfishness, manifested as a craving for self approval, it is easy to perceive the utter and destructive impracticability of any system exalting that crude and unmoral selfishness which has not been refined into a delicate altruism. Such a bestial relapse means the end of human harmony and cooperation, and therefore of civilization. "
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"By my thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance, and by my seventeenth, about which time I did some particularly detailed writing on the subject, I had formed in all essential particulars my present pessimistic cosmic views. The futility of all existence began to impress and oppress me; and my references to human progress, formerly hopeful, began to decline in enthusiasm."
It took him a long time to adapt himself to this excoriation. To realize pooh it's nothing. A mere bagatelle. The common lot. A harmless joke. That will not last for ever.
ReplyDelete〜Samuel Beckett, from The Unnamable