We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
It is a vertiginous nauseating scary prospect ... very hard to say to the rest of the world, ‘Oh my, I have wasted the last forty years of my life.’ Daniel C Dennett, The Evolution of Confusion AAI 2009
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed – however obliquely and at a terrible price – by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfil. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions – Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God – for us to do this. Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Vincent’s passionate belief was that people wouldn’t just see his pictures, but feel the rush of life in them. That by the force of his brush and the dazzlement of his colour they’d experience those fields, those faces, those flowers in ways nothing more polite or literal could ever possibly convey. His art would reclaim what had once belonged to Religion: consolation for our mortality through the relish of the gift of Life. Simon Schama’s Power of Art: Van Gogh, BBC 2006
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, 1929
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short. Bertrand Russell
Philosophy is an odd thing ... The most important philosophy I think is that even if it isn’t true, you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife. You cannot for one second I think abrogate the responsibility of believing that this is it. Stephen Fry, televised interview
It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing – they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. Stephen Fry, Moab is My Washpot
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you. Philip Roth, American Pastoral
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying. Joan of Arc
We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon. Franklin D Roosevelt
Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe. Gail Devers
I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I’m an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after. Cat Stevens
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life. Jiddu Krishnamurti
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief. Sigmund Freud
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, as if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? Sigmund Freud
And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. Isaac Asimov
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov
What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right. Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
We each live an extraordinary and improbable life. Derren Brown: Fear and Faith, Channel 4 2012
No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them. John Muir
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’ John Greenleaf Whittier, The Brewing of Soma, 1872
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. George Orwell
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. George Orwell, Animal Farm
Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. George Orwell, 1984
It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. ibid.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. George Orwell
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe and Everything
Life – don’t talk to me about life. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2005 starring Martin Freeman & Sam Rockwell & Mos Def & Zooey Deschanel & Bill Nighy & Warwick Davis & Anna Chancellor & John Malkovich & Kelly Macdonald et al, director Garth Jennings; see also novel Douglas Adams, Marvin
All I wanted to say was this: so long as you can keep violently disagreeing with each other, and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourselves on the Gravy Train for Life. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe, computer
Two old men: Deep Thought. Do you have ... Have you ...
Deep Thought: An answer for you? Yes.
Two Old Men: Well?