“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.”
Tariq Ali (1943) British Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian
Commentary essay, "For one day only, I'm a Lib Dem: We must take the politics of the anti-war front into the electoral arena," The Guardian, March 26, 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1445964,00.html#article_continue.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher
The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (1961), translated from the French by William R. Trask, [first published in German as Das Heilige und das Profane (1957)].
“The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world.”
Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher
As quoted in The Structure of Religious Knowing : Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan (2004) by John Daniel Dadosky, p. 89.
Context: When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also a revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.
“Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.”
Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun
Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist
The Boyle lecture (2005)
Paul Robeson (1898–1976) American singer and actor
"Some Reflections on Othello and the Nature of Our Time." in The American Scholar (Autumn 1945); also quoted in Paul Robeson : The Whole World in His Hands (1981) by Susan Robeson, p. 150
Context: It was deeply fascinating to watch how strikingly contemporary American audiences from coast to coast found Shakespeare's Othello — painfully immediate in its unfolding of evil, innocence, passion, dignity and nobility, and contemporary in its overtones of a clash of cultures, of the partial acceptance of and consequent effect upon one of a minority group. Against this background, the jealousy of the protagonist becomes more credible, the blows to his pride more understandable, the final collapse of his personal, individual world more inevitable. But beyond the personal tragedy, the terrible agony of Othello, the irretrievability of his world, the complete destruction of all his trusted and sacred values — all these suggest the shattering of a universe.