Purposeless Quotes

Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. ~ Paul Davies

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors. ~ Henry Adams

Surely there were others like me, born without an inkling of direction. The wanderers, the amblers, the dabblers, united by our purposeless mantra-I have no idea what to do with my life. ~ Suzanne Selfors

I could almost hear their voices asking, 'Why here, why now?'
But of course they could have just as easily been asking, 'Why not here, why not now?' It would
not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even
though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of
random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no
particular reason. ~ Thomas Ligotti

If we strive for goals, relishing in the pleasure of circumstance, nothing is enjoyable, and life becomes purposeless. ~ Andrew The Apostle

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law? ~ Bernhard Schlink

During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wish ~ Thomas Ligotti

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. ~ Mark Twain

In June 2002, airport security searched Al Gore. There's a lot not to like about Gore, but he's not a terrorist. Gore said he was glad he was searched. Why? To spare a terrorist the trouble? This is a serious national issue; why must liberals lie? Searching Al Gore is purely a religious act. It is the purposeless fetishistic performance of ritual in accordance with the civic religion of liberalism. ~ Ann Coulter

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine. ~ Mem Fox

I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony. ~ Winston Churchill

In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities. ~ Richard O. Prum

We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life - this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial. ~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon

He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
- dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
- buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
- rape women
- set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
- steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit. ~ Don Winslow

Life without her would be an endless succession of purposeless days lived with a heavy hopelessness ~ L. Ron Hubbard

As soon as [Patricia Highsmith] had stopped work, she felt purposeless and quite at a loss about what to do with herself. 'There is no real life except in working,' she wrote in her notebook, 'that is to say in the imagination.' It was in this state that she observed that only one situation would drive her to commit murder - being part of a family unit. Most likely, she thought, she would strike out in anger at a small child, felling them in one blow. But children over the age of eight, she surmised, would probably take two blows to kill. The reality of socialising with anyone, no matter how close, she said, left her feeling fatigued. ~ Andrew Wilson

Every relationship has one or the other motive behind it. Friendship or enemity are not purposeless.Oneness of motive is turned into friendship. While diversity of motive cause enemity. Royal relationships also depend uypon one or theother purpose. But such relatins ar mainly for the welfare of the state. ~ Chanakya

You don't get to make my decisions for me. It's my life and only I know what I need and what I'm willing to go through. I don't want to live without you. I felt that once. I never want to feel it again." I'd been lost, purposeless, denied Heaven. It was as if his frequency and my frequency made such an exquisite song together that without it I wasn't alive. ~ Karen Marie Moning

She didn't usually mind being just a bit in over her head. She generally flailed like a becalmed ship, irritable and purposeless and panicked, when things were simple. ~ Julie Anne Long

Men, discouraged by their failure to accomplish exactly what they desire, often speak of their lives as purposeless, but it is idle talk, for, in fact, no intelligent life which concerns itself vigorously and properly with the things about it can be said to be purposeless. Such a life adheres, automatically, to the law of progression, and therefore moves toward a great destiny of supreme power and accompanying joys. The only purposeless life is the one that does not use its faculties. It matters little what tasks men perform in life, if only they do them well and will all their strength. In the eternal plan they are given progressive value. In an infinite universe, one cannot possibly learn all or do all, at once. A beginning must be made somewhere and corner by corner, department by department, space by space, all will be known and conquered. In the end, all must be explored, and whether one begins in the east or the west cannot matter much. The big concern is the extent to which a man offers himself, mind and body, to his worthwhile work. Upon that will growth depend. ~ John A. Widtsoe

The Veretian palace, afroth with ornament, paid only lip service to defence. The parapets were purposeless curving decorative spires. The slippery domes that he skirted would be a nightmare in an attack, hiding one part of the roof from the other. ~ C.S. Pacat

Most of the travel was purposeless, carried out in exactly the desperate spirit of fleeing from pursuers. It was romantic, in a certain sense. Especially if you're not the one doing it. ~ Charles Frazier

Try to relax, and you will find out that you feel more tense than ever. Try harder and you will feel more tense and more tense. Relaxation is not a consequence, is not a result of some activity; it is the glow of understanding. This is the first thing I would like to relate to you: life is purposeless. It is very hard to accept it. And why is it so hard to accept that life is purposeless? It is hard because without purpose the ego cannot exist. It is hard to conceive that life has no goal because without any goal being there, there is no point in having a mind, in having an ego. ~ Rajneesh

If life is really as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable ... ,then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative ... That search is a survival mechanism. ~ Amanda Ripley

You have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne? ~ N.K. Jemisin

Could a man decide, 'I am right, and everyone else is wrong?'
No evidence of a malfunction, he thought. I am not a coward. Neither am I insane.
His heart cried, 'I am disgusted with this purposeless war. I shall quit fighting it. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

'Bunk' is better than 'Wheel of Fortune' because we have a wheel, just like them, but our wheel is purposeless. It doesn't do anything. It just spins for no reason. Which is nice because it frees our wheel up to really pursue its dream: becoming a professional paddlewheel. ~ Kurt Braunohler

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life. ~ Sigmund Freud

Purposeless life will definitely be gray, monotonous, ordinary and frustrating ~ Sunday Adelaja

Loving yourself is being aware of how you spend your time. Eliminating purposeless daily activities and prioritizing will free up your time in order for you to focus on living in purpose. ~ Victoria L. White

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

When we surrender to a purposeless existence, we are surrendering to death way ahead of death's actual arrival. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

In my opinion instruction is very purposeless for such individuals who do no want merely to collect a mass of knowledge, but are mainly interested in exercising (training) their own powers. One doesn't need to grasp such a one by the hand and lead him to the goal, but only from time to time give him suggestions, in order that he may reach it himself in the shortest way. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss

a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one. ~ William Gibson

Don't take purposeless people as your leaders. Their life is like an empty book with a nice cover paper and you have attempted to buy it. Of which use will it be to you for you to read blank pages. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them. ~ Rebecca West

And in that moment I experience a revelation.
I realize now that it was a painful sense that the world is purposeless, the lazy fruit of a misunderstanding, but in that moment I was able to translate what I felt only as: God does not exist. ~ Umberto Eco

I feel empty and purposeless, like the first day of summer after school ends, but I am free. ~ Lindsay Smith

It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if you will: standing back, as it were, from the vague and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain detachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it: can discern too, if you be at all inclined to mystical adventure, the stages of the road along which you must pass on your way towards harmony with the Real. ~ Evelyn Underhill

There is simply no problem of life; it is absolutely purposeless play; it doesn't have to continue; there is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, gestures gesturing. If there is any problem at all it is to find out how people come to think there is a problem, whatever made them imagine that life is serious. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, multiplicity are all complications of it. Pain and suffering are very far-out forms of play, and there just isn't anything at all to be afraid of. There isn't any ego. The ego is a kind of flip, knowing that you know - like being afraid of being afraid. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to things, a sort of double take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety. ~ Alan W. Watts

To kill time - an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time. ~ Yiyun Li

I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as a story of a homecoming.But it is not a story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. ~ George Gaylord Simpson

But so went forth Darnell, day by day, strangely mistaking death for life, madness for sanity, and purposeless and wandering phantoms for true beings. He was sincerely of opinion that he was a City clerk, living in Shephard's Bush
having forgotten the mysteries and the far-shining glories of the kingdom which was his by legitimate inheritance. ~ Arthur Machen

For too long, we've called unbelievers to "invite Jesus into your life." Jesus doesn't want to be in your life. Your life is a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life. And his life isn't boring or purposeless or static. It's wild and exhilarating and unpredictable. ~ Russell D. Moore

A woman cannot bear to feel empty and purposeless. But a man may take real pleasure in that feeling. A man can take real pride and satisfaction in pure negation: 'I am quite empty of feeling. I don't care the slightest bit in the world for anybody or anything except myself. But I do care for myself, and I'm going to survive in spite of them all, and I'm going to have my own success without caring the least in the world how I get it. Because I'm cleverer than they are, I'm cunninger than they are, even if I'm weak. I must build myself up proper protections, and entrench myself, and then I'm safe. I can sit inside my glass tower and feel nothing and be touched by nothing, and yet exert my power, my will, through the glass walls of my ego'.
That, roughly, is the condition of a man who accepts the condition of true egoism, and emptiness, in himself. He has a certain pride in the condition, since in pure emptiness of real feeling he can still carry out his ambition, his will to egoistic success.

Now I doubt if a woman can feel like this. The most egoistic woman is always in a tangle of hate, if not of love. But the true male egoist neither hates nor loves. He is quite empty, at the middle of him. Only on the surface he has feelings: and these he is always trying to get away from. Inwardly, he feels nothing. And when he feels nothing, he exults in his ego and knows he is safe. Safe, within his fortifications, inside his glass tower.

But I doubt if women c ~ D.H. Lawrence

But by the time you've worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices. ~ Patricia Hampl

In the Middle Ages, as in Classical times, the academy possessed freedom unknown to other bodies and persons because the philosopher, the scholar, and the student were looked upon as men consecrated to the service of the Truth; and that Truth was not simply a purposeless groping after miscellaneous information , but a wisdom to be obtained, however imperfectly, from a teleological search. ~ Russell Kirk

A nation without a myth drifts aimlessly throughout history. Myth gives purpose and meaning to the civilisation. Myth makes a people a nation, a nation a race, and a race a contributor to the world. Myth shapes the race so that the race may fulfil the potential of its individual. The myth makes us conscious that we are a race, and not merely an arbitrary, purposeless, ill-defined conglomerate of men and women. ~ Alfred Rosenberg

It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

The ultimate foundation of spirituality is the recognition that there can't be such a thing as a purposeful life in a purposeless universe. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

I have for many years endeavored to make this vital truth clear; and still people marvel when I tell them that I am happy. They imagine that my limitations weigh heavily upon my spirit, and chain me to the rock of despair. Yet, it seems to me, happiness has very little to do with the senses. If we make up our minds that this is a drab and purposeless universe, it will be that, and nothing else. On the other hand, if we believe that the earth is ours, and that the sun and moon hang in the sky for our delight, there will be joy upon the hills and gladness in the fields because the Artist in our souls glorifies creation. Surely, it gives dignity to life to believe that we are born into this world for noble ends, and that we have a higher destiny than can be accomplished within the narrow limits of this physical life. ~ Helen Keller

A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

Self-education is open to all but it is taken only by those who refuse to live a small and purposeless life. ~ Seema Brain Openers

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day. ~ Peace Pilgrim

[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it. ~ Philip Johnson

Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens ... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet. ~ Freeman Dyson

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the
machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have
control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car of
his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will
be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two
difference. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater
control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be
necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the
system. If the elite is ruthless the may simply decide to exterminate
the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or
other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate
until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the
elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may
decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human
race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are
satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic
conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and
that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure
his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will
have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove
their need for the pow ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

A marriage ... makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work, and doubles the strength of each to perform it; it gives to two questioning natures a reason for living, and something to live for; it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life. ~ Mark Twain

The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen. ~ Eugen Herrigel

If this world were populated with really thinking beings, it would be impossible
for all kinds of noise to be permitted and given such unlimited scope, even
the most terrible and purposeless. But if nature had intended man for thinking,
she would not have given him ears, or at any rate would have furnished them
with air-tight flaps, as with bats whom for this reason I envy. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

..it just seems that I am running on a purposeless treadmill, behind and paralyzed in science, dreading every day of the horrible year ahead when I should be reveling in my major. ~ Sylvia Plath

I have always enjoyed this part of the journey the most - the passing through of places where one would never wish to stay but that hold a strange, eerie beauty all of their own. There, with the heavens open wide above, streaked with silent stars and constellations, so vast and beautiful, then I would feel that our journey was not purposeless after all. ~ Laura McVeigh

There is nothing so unpardonable as to consent to a senseless, aimless and purposeless life. Helen Keller ~ Robin S. Sharma

Life becomes a dilemma when you are living a purposeless and goalless life ~ Sunday Adelaja

A purposeless and goalless life is meaningless ~ Sunday Adelaja

The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It's soul-destroying. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

All change...arises from an underlying collapse into chaos...what may appear to us to be motive and purpose is in fact ultimately motiveless, purposeless decay. ~ Peter Atkins

It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage, but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militance wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many do not even want. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The universe does not have a purpose, but we do have! Our purpose is to re-shape this purposeless universe in a way that it will not be able to kill us! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity ...
Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence.
(pg.115-116, "The Body and the Earth") ~ Wendell Berry

In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary ~ Maimonides

Any purpose will be entirely purposeless unless it completely exceeds my ability to achieve it for only then is there room for God, and without God purpose of even the most magnificent sort remains utterly and abjectly purposeless. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of the scientific establishment seem genuinely amazed that the citizens do not accept finch-beak variation as proof of the claim that humans, like all animals and plants, are accidental products of a purposeless universe in which only material processes have operated from the beginning. ~ Phillip E. Johnson

Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule in a gas in a beaker, given sufficient time, will leave the beaker. I noted that this provides a perspective on an important question concerning the evolution of intelligence. Like molecules in a gas, evolutionary changes also move every which way with no apparent direction. Yet we nonetheless see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution's supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking. So we are able to gain an insight
into how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics). ~ Ray Kurzweil

The cat ... is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that "when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped." For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior - that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward. ~ Alan W. Watts

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There's no way out.
–
You'll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight. ~ Alexandr Blok

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other. ~ Daniel Dennett

Whatever change you desire for the world, create that change in your own life. You are here for a purpose. Seek it out. Hunt it down. The greatest misery is to be purposeless. The great depression of our age is not economic, but spiritual. Our spiritual poverty is rooted in our purposelessness. ~ Matthew Kelly

[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some–an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book The Mind of God, proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, purposeless forces. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness. ~ Ambrose Bierce

He had been working at the wall for too long. Why he bothered the Lord only knew. After all, it went nowhere and closed in nothing. His grandfather had been a master waller in the dale, but the skill had not been passed down the generations. He supposed he liked is for the same reason he liked fishing: mindless relaxation. In an age of totalitarian utilitarianism, Gristhorpe thought, a man needs as much purposeless activity as he can find. ~ Peter Robinson

In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains "of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life" and feels his "amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless." He describes "subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression," "violent oscillations of self-esteem," and "a general inability to get along." He gains "a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported." Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happiness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth living. ~ Christopher Lasch

The topic of disinterested, non-calculating, and purposeless love for the sake of love is central to mysticism as such. To love God, not because of powerful institutions, or even because God commands it, but to do so in an act of unencumbered freedom, is the very source of mystical relation. To love God is all the reason there needs to be . . . The orthodoxies that have been handed down to us in the monotheistic religions called for obedience to the commanding God. They threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards - images of hell and heaven resting on that authority. In technologically advanced centers of the world, authoritarian religious systems are in sharp decline. Mystical perceptions and approaches to God, however, are entirely different: "God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty" (Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy). Mysticism may he regarded as the anti-authoritarian religion per se. In it, the commanding lord becomes the beloved; what is to come later becomes the now; and naked or even enlightened self-interest that is oriented by reward and punishment becomes mystical freedom. ~ Dorothee Solle

I slunk
off in the direction of the cocktail table - the only place in
the garden where a single man could linger without looking
purposeless and alone. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a "tale told by an idiot," a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens - the "evolutionary goof." Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, "There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth." In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all. ~ Jane Goodall

Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing - rather, knowing for sure - that there was a purposefullness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos - that it was beyond man's rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.
There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.
On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. ~ Edgar D. Mitchell

A purposeless life is a meaningless life ~ Sunday Adelaja

The men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational - it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. ~ Ayn Rand

One of the most remarkable facts of this age is the negligible direct personal power which scientists have in the control of the world's affairs. The marvelous means they so successfully produce are always used by non-scientists against whom the scientists themselves seem to be powerless and even purposeless. What clever sheep they are. ~ Nanamoli Thera