Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.
If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.
— Fo-Yan
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.
Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.
Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.
— Lao-Tzu
The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.
— Lin-Chi
The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.
Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.
Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.
Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
I am a part of all that I have met.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.
— Yuan-Sou