abstract quotes on life

Quotes and Sayings

60 famous abstract quotes sayings on art, and life.

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Love reading abstract quotes?

Below, you will find our collection of famous quotes about abstract art , photography, and design .

There is always a mystical pull to abstract paintings. It’s very subjective as an onlooker and makes one ponder more about the appeal of art.

The abstract art form gained prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century and differs significantly from traditional art forms.

Unlike accurately representing the image, the abstract form is about artistic independence to go wild on imagination.

Abstract paintings are famously called the purest form of expression to create far deeper visuals than representing an objective reality.

But art genius Pablo Picasso’s statement makes us wonder even more.

He quotes, There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality.’

Best Abstract Quotes and Sayings

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. – Lucian Freud

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery. – Eric Cantona

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life – rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. – Robert Motherwell

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. – Gerard Way

It abstract art should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not. – Jackson Pollock

Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it. – Mahatma Gandhi

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. – Theodor Adorno

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness. – Willem de Kooning

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. – Gerhard Richter

The abstract has no emotional content, the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is. – Cecil Balmond

Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. – Richard Diebenkorn

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. – Pablo Picasso

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. – Sol Lewitt

All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality. – Mike Svob

Colorful Abstract Quotes

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use. – Julian Jaynes

It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity. – Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

You can’t look at abstract art without thinking. – Patricia Cole

Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form. – Anton Ehrenzweig

The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought. – John Bargh

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. – Theodor Adorno

The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment… it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given. – Paul Dirac

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality. – Jim Hodges

An abstract title suggests another value to the subject, perhaps an artistic quality that sets the viewers’ sensitivities into action. – Robert Genn

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. – Ben Shahn

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than we actually see. – Giorgio Morandi

The nature of what we call democracy is sadly no longer an abstract discussion beloved of political science professors. – Richard Wolfe

Objective painting is not a good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. – Georgia O’Keeffe

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so-called figurative artists insist that what they really care about is the abstract qualities of life. – Marlene Dumas

Life Abstract Quotes

I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it. – Steven Wright

To bring my own prejudice into the open, abstract expressionism is a genre I have always distrusted, mainly because so much of it seems to me to express violent reactionary anarchism, a repudiating not so much of the traditions as of the community of painting. – Northyrop Frye

The difference between non-objective and abstract painting may be suggested by the difference between mathematics and music. – Northrop Frye

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. – Edmund Burke

A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. – Al Capp

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. – Paul Klee

I think the greatest feature of a lot of the images is that they’re not completely explainable and that they can have different meanings for different people. – Keith Haring

The kind of images I’m drawing has changed a lot. I’ve become much more conscious of who’s seeing them and thinking about them: realizing that the drawings are a great vehicle for getting ideas across, not just abstract ideas, but actual ideas or philosophies. – Keith Haring

I’d gone from the abstract drawings to the word pieces, but I decided that I was going to draw again. But if I was going to draw again, I couldn’t go back to the abstract drawings; they had to have some connection to the real world. – Keith Haring

I have found another kind of enjoyment through illness that is more important and unmeasurable. I have found that I am closer to abstract things in my sickness than in health. – Khalil Gibran

Black and white are abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world. – Joel Sternfeld

One of the things I like about music is its abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing. – Bernard Sumner

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms is the shadows they create to hide a vacuum. – Joseph Joubert

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. – Salvador Dali

Intriguing Quotes About Abstract Art

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting. – Max Beckmann

Life is abstract art, and it’s up to you to make sense of it. – Talismanist Giebra

The form itself, even if completely abstract has its own inner sound. – Wassily Kandinsky

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. – Arshile Gorky

Abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. – Piet Mondrian

Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion, and mystery, rather than obvious description. – Robert Genn

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. – Jackson Pollock

Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout. – Lawren Harris

I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed the imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes. – Jean Helion

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. – Roger Scruton

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative. – Piet Mondrian

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. – Debasish Mridha

Abstract ideas are the patterns two or more memories have in common. – Rudolf Flesch

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs. – Denis Diderot

Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later. – Robert A. Heinlein

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Best abstract quotes

Home » Quotes » Best abstract quotes

Abstract quotes offer a unique perspective on life, love, and everything in between. These thought-provoking quotes veer away from the conventional and delve into the realm of abstract thinking. They challenge our perceptions and ignite our imagination, encouraging us to see the world through a different lens. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, looking for a new perspective, or simply enjoy pondering the abstract, these quotes are sure to captivate your mind and spark your creativity.

Abstract quotes can be found in various forms of art, literature, and philosophy. They often defy explanation and invite us to interpret their meaning in our own way. These quotes embrace ambiguity and encourage us to explore the depths of our own thoughts and emotions. They provide a glimpse into the vastness of human experience and the complexities of the world we inhabit.

Abstract quotes can be both profound and puzzling. They challenge us to question our assumptions and break free from conventional thinking. They invite us to step outside our comfort zones and embrace the unknown. By embracing abstract quotes, we open ourselves up to new possibilities and invite a sense of wonder into our lives.

Read these Abstract Quotes

1. “The true voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

2. “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein

3. “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” – Pablo Picasso

4. “The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” – Bertrand Russell

5. “The only way to deal with temptation is to yield to it.” – Oscar Wilde

6. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

7. “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Lao Tzu

8. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” – Albert Einstein

9. “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” – Buddha

10. “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein

11. “Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” – Cesar A. Cruz

12. “The more I see, the less I know for sure.” – John Lennon

13. “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” – Pablo Picasso

14. “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality.” – Pablo Picasso

15. “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

16. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” – Jack Kerouac

17. “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” – Emile Zola

18. “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh

19. “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso

20. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein

These abstract quotes offer a glimpse into the depths of human thought and emotion. They remind us that life is not always black and white, and that sometimes, the most profound truths lie in the abstract. So take a moment to reflect on these quotes, let your mind wander, and allow yourself to embrace the beauty of the abstract.

38 Quotes On Abstraction

Al Capp — tell us how you really feel! 😉

P.K. Hunter

My thoughts exactly 🙂

50 Inspiring Art Quotes by Famous Artists

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” – Francis Bacon
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” – Pablo Picasso
“I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.” – Vincent van Gogh
“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.” – Andy Warhol
“Creativity takes courage” – Henri Matisse
“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.” – Frida Kahlo
“I dream my painting and then I paint my dream.” – Vincent Willem van Gogh
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” – William Faulkner
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” – Pablo Picasso
“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.” – Philip Guston
“Every artist was once an amateur.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see” – Henry David Thoreau
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work” – Émile Zola
“Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.” – Magdalena Abakanowicz
“I paint not the things I see but the feelings they evoke in me” – Odilon Redon
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” – Pablo Picasso
“The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.” – Jerzy Kosinski
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton
“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is” – Jackson Pollock
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes, art is knowing which ones to keep” – Scott Adams
“I find my days are filled with thinking about art. I’m not sure if that means I should pursue it more seriously, or just enjoy the moments in my mind while they last” – Vincent van Gogh
“Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.” – Pablo Picasso
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” – Pablo Picasso
“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvellous” – Bill Moyers
“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte
“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” – Plutarch
“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” – Vincent van Gogh
“I never paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” – Frida Kahlo
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life” – Oscar Wilde
“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” – Alberto Giacometti
“Creativity is contagious, pass it on.” – Albert Einstein
“To create one’s own world takes courage” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” – Pablo Picasso
“The only way to become a better artist is to practice and study the works of other artists” – Pablo Picasso
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home” – Twyla Tharp
“A picture is a poem without words.” – Horace
“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” – Michelangelo
“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” – Paul Cezanne
“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” – Augustus Rodin
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” – Pablo Picasso
“True art is characterised by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.” – Albert Einstein
“He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” – Francis of Assisi
“Art is not freedom from discipline, but disciplined freedom.” – John F. Kennedy
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” – Aristotle
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” – Oscar Wilde
“In art as in love, instinct is enough.” – Anatole France

5 Abstract Art Quotes for Endless Inspiration

Abstract art quotes and inspiring quotes can and, I think, help us to move forward in our lives. As an abstract artist, I thrive on inspiration. I’m constantly seeking out sources of creative energy to fuel my passion for abstract painting.

Lately, I’ve been deeply moved and motivated by quotes about abstract art. These poignant words from pioneering abstract artists reveal so much truth and meaning about this imaginative art form.

Abstract art quotes have almost a mystical quality to them – they open doors in my mind, sparking new ideas and fresh ways of seeing.

When I discover a new abstract art quote, it’s as if the words lift off the page, swirling around me in a vortex of colour and shape.

The best abstract art quotes distil profound insights about art, creativity and life down to their essence. They capture elusive feelings and phenomena I struggle to put into words.

Abstract art quotes validate what I aim to communicate through my colourful, emotionally charged paintings.

In this blog post, I will share five abstract art quotes that inspire me deeply as an abstract artist. My goal is to analyse why these quotes resonate so strongly, explaining their significance in the world of abstract painting.

Even more, I hope to demonstrate how these abstract art quotes illuminate truths about the human experience that apply far beyond art. Buckle up for a thought-provoking ride to the beating heart of abstraction!

The first quote comes from avant-garde painter Arshile Gorky, an Armenian-American artist celebrated as the father of Abstract Expressionism…

Arshile Gorky Abstract Art Quote

“ Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.” – Arshile Gorky

A great inspiring quote from a great artist .

Who is Arshile Gorky?

Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-American abstract painter in the early 20th century who deeply influenced the evolution of abstract art.

He is known for his poetic, surrealist-inspired abstract paintings that expressed his tragic personal history and complex perspective as an immigrant.

Though not well-known in his lifetime, Gorky would posthumously gain recognition as the “Father of Abstract Expressionism”.

The meaning of the quote

This inspiring quote beautifully captures Gorky’s view of abstract art as liberating the mind, allowing the artist and viewer to perceive realms beyond ordinary physical reality.

To Gorky, abstract painting opened portals to unseen spiritual, psychological and emotional dimensions. His quote suggests abstraction grants artists an almost mystical vision – enabling us to “ see with the mind ” realities invisible to the eye.

Gorky conceived of abstract art as revealing deeper truths through pure aesthetic forms like colour, line and shape. His words inspire me to approach abstract painting as a journey of imagination and self-discovery.

To me, creating art is a journey of self-discovery .

How quotes inspire my approach to abstract art?

Whenever I read this inspiring abstract art quote, I am reminded that abstract art offers not just freedom of expression but freedom of vision.

My abstract paintings become vehicles for seeing “with the mind’s eye” – conveying inner landscapes, sacred geometries and surreal dreamscapes beyond the tangible world.

I let go of conscious control and expectations to access subconscious realms where inspiring abstract art quotes emerge as I paint.

My goal is to create portals through which viewers might glimpse unseen dimensions or feel renewed wonder at abstraction’s strange beauty.

I approach abstract art as visionary work – scrying with shapes and symbols, channelling arcane muses, decoding the hieroglyphics of the soul.

This abstract art quote spurs me to keep evolving my personal abstract visual language to ever more closely depict these extraordinary inner visions.

Georgia-Okeeffe-Yellow-Hickory-Leaves-with-Daisy-1928

Georgia O’Keeffe Quote

“ I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for .” – Georgia O’Keeffe

This is such an inspiring quote from a great artist. I’ve used this quote in several other blog posts, too.

About Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was a pioneering modernist painter known for her vivid abstract flower paintings. Though she rejected being labelled as part of any artistic movement, O’Keeffe’s luminous, enlarged flower canvases presented new ways of seeing nature through an abstract lens.

She pushed boundaries with her unique signature style of abstraction that embodied feminine spirituality and energy.

Georgia-Okeeffe-Red-Hills-with-Flowers-1937

Expressing meanings beyond language with colour and shape

This inspiring quote is probably one of the best abstract art quotes. It almost describes the meaning of abstract art in one simple sentence.

The meaning behind abstract art is profoundly multifaceted, evoking a wide array of interpretations. More than just shapes and colours for their own aesthetic sake, abstract art is intended to communicate complex concepts that engage the mind on a deep level.

This quote by O’Keeffe resonates deeply as an abstract artist. It articulates my belief that the alchemy of colour and shape in painting can convey ineffable meanings beyond the limitations of language.

O’Keeffe recognises abstract art’s power to wordlessly communicate emotions and ideas straight from the artist’s interior world.

Through visual language, we symbolise what cannot be spoken. This relates to my quest to develop a personal abstract iconography – my own lexicon of colours, lines and shapes bursting with intimate significance.

I aim to share my distinctive inner landscape, inspiring viewers to connect through universal childhood symbols or cosmic motifs.

Examples from my paintings

Visions from Within: Raising Awareness through Abstract Art

Here are examples of some My Colourful Abstract Paintings Collection for 2023 .

This is part of my series of “ Almost Black and White ”. I’ve written a blog about this particular series – Add Striking Black and White Abstract Art in Your Living Room .

Art often imitates life – and sometimes it calls us to open our eyes to truths we prefer to ignore. My abstract paintings welcome you to see beyond the apparent randomness of shape and colour – and glimpse deeper stories of health, heartbreak and the indestructible human spirit.

In “Pulse”, frenetic black lines suggest the disorienting chaos of a heart spiralling into arrhythmia. Against this jagged backdrop, a small red orb seems to beat with anxious purpose – a metaphor for how this vital organ can falter despite sustaining us with every pulse. This canvas raises awareness of cardiac health.

“Growth” uses consuming black lines to depict the spread of malignant cells, shrinking the red form at its centre as darkness prevails. The loss of natural balance and devouring spread wordlessly convey the terror of cancer – an illness originating from within yet propagating with unchecked aggression.

Finally, “Clarity” whips black scratches into a swirling storm, mimicking the turmoil experienced by vital systems in distress. Yet gliding calmly at its eye, a red sphere embodies resilience and hope, even on the most difficult journeys. This is a tribute to the human spirit’s power to find meaning amid life’s chaos.

My dreamlike paintings reflect sobering truths – but their final message illuminates health awareness and our collective ability to anchor ourselves in wisdom and grace despite the storms.

Let the colours and shapes speak to you, inspire self-reflection, and kindle compassion for what ails us all from time to time. The paths to healing often wind through mysterious and surprising terrain.

O’Keeffe’s inspiring quote reaffirms my commitment to abstraction as profound, wordless communication.

Wassily-Kandinsky-Circle-in-a-Circle-1923

Wassily Kandinsky Abstract Art Quote

“ Form itself, even if completely abstract … has its own inner sound .” – Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky – The father of abstract art

Wassily Kandinsky is considered by many to be the father of pure abstract art or the pioneer of European abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist in the early 20th century. He is credited as one of the original pioneers of pure abstract art and wrote extensively about the capacities of colour and form to convey emotions and ideas.

Kandinsky explored synaesthesia in his radical abstract compositions, seeking to evoke sound through visual art. His writing and painting expanded conceptions of what abstraction could achieve.

The inner sound of abstract form

This great inspiring quote beautifully encapsulates Kandinsky’s perspective on the “ inner sound ” of abstract art – its capacity to resonate on deeper levels beyond the merely visual.

He suggests that even wholly abstract forms have an intrinsic, emotional impact similar to music’s direct expressiveness.

Kandinsky invites us to tune into the poetic, lyrical essence in simple marks and patterns. This challenges me to consider the figurative qualities in abstraction – how a jagged red line conjures instability or concentric circles soothe like a lullaby.

motivational-quotes-with-abstract-art-by-ezeeart

How I try to evoke particular moods or sounds with abstractions?

When designing my abstract compositions , I consciously try to direct energies and establish tonalities through strategic use of colour, shape and line – much like a composer scoring a film.

Above is another set of three paintings form “ My Colourful Abstract Paintings Collection for 2023.”

Emerging from the shadows, three abstract visions materialise with messages to proclaim. Sombre and dark backgrounds give way to textures thick and swirling, colours dancing in layers mystifying.

In one, a heart glows crimson behind masks of gold paint, chaotic strokes both obscuring and sheltering the vital core.

Another holds blossoms of pink and white, petals budding with hope yet tinged with darkness. And the third weaves indigo strands parted by white, light bursting through webs that both threaten and protect.

These three soulful artworks layer meaning upon meaning. They whisper of the heart’s strength, flowers that can heal or harm, the maze of twists and turns towards health’s fragile gates.

Abstract yet intimate, their swirling dreams reflect human truths waiting to be unveiled in every unique stroke.

Kandinsky’s abstract art quote affirms for me that the “grammar” of abstract art can speak intangibly yet profoundly straight to the soul.

Robert-Motherwell-Running-Elegy-II-Yellow-State-1983

Robert Motherwell Inspiring Quote

“ Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life – rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.” – Robert Motherwell

Abstract expressionism at its best

Robert Motherwell was a preeminent American abstract expressionist painter and member of the New York School.

Known for his philosophical approach to art, Motherwell created bold, emotional abstract paintings drawing from themes of tragedy and revolt. He emphasised subjectivity, instinct and creative freedom in his dynamic, large-scale canvases.

Abstract art – a rebellious response to the modern world

This abstract art quote crystallises Motherwell’s perspective on abstraction as intrinsically defiant and individualistic – an artistic rebellion against the constraints of traditional standards, values and logic imposed by the modern world.

To him, rejecting concrete representation freed artists to channel their private passions, fears and dreams to engage audiences on a raw, emotional plane beyond the rational.

I relate to his conception of abstract art as liberating the imagination from artistic conventions, letting our inner demons and marvels emerge in pure pigment.

My abstract art as personal expression reflecting modern experiences

Like Motherwell, I approach abstract painting as an antidote to modern overwhelm – a means of finding my centre while navigating today’s fragmented digital age.

Free-flowing and intuitive, the process helps me achieve mindfulness, presence and emotional clarity.

Spontaneous drips, scribbles and gestural strokes release stress and unfiltered feelings in a healthy catharsis.

Through rich layers of oils and acrylics, I manifest a sanctuary from digital distraction. Bold colour explosions echo my sensitivities to overstimulating urban spaces. Radiant geometries evoke transcendental refuge and order amidst chaos.

My abstract works transparently reflect genuine responses to modern life. Though non-representational art , they are profoundly expressive – authentic windows to my inner soul.

Additional Kandinsky Abstract Art Quote

“ Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and colours and that you be a true poet. This last is essential .” – Wassily Kandinsky

This amazing inspiring quote is perhaps the best advice for beginner abstract artists or experienced abstract artists wanting to develop their artwork to the next level.

This abstract art quote comes from pioneering abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky’s famous book “ Concerning the Spiritual in Art “, first published in 1911.

As an acclaimed painter and theorist, Kandinsky’s views on the challenges and rewards of abstract art hold particular weight. Given his role championing pure abstraction, this quote offers rare insight.

Meaning and significance

Here, Kandinsky suggests abstract painting requires an advanced, versatile skillset – excellent craftsmanship and refined intuitions around composition, colour and poetic vision.

He believed succeeding at the highest levels of abstraction demands technical mastery combined with mystical creativity and imagination.

Kandinsky implies that those drawn to abstraction must undergo tremendous artistic development – dedicating themselves wholly to accessing profound inner truth through pure aesthetic elements alone.

There is a spiritual dimension involved in distilling communication to its barest yet most universal visual language.

Just to further explain a piece of great advice for serious abstract artists or any other artists, here’s a great video that explains another amazing quote about abstract art from a great abstract artist, Picasso, who said: “It took me 4 years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

How Picasso Explained Modern Art in One Quote, by The Canvas .

More inspiration

I am bolstered by Kandinsky’s abstract art quote, as it further validates the challenges every abstract artist faces in exceeding the limits of figural representation to uncover essential meanings through colour, line and form alone.

His words inspire me to continue strengthening my technical skills while nurturing my most radical creative instincts. My abstract inspiration draws from avant-garde jazz, sacred geometries and glassy dreamscapes.

As Kandinsky suggests, I strive to subsume ego and channel mystical visions, expressing ineffable realms in my cosmic abstractions.

This demands constant openness and discipline. Guided by abstract art quotes like this, I accept abstraction as a monumental, lifelong quest to reveal my deepest truths.

Conclusion – Inspiring Abstract Art Quotes

Revisiting these marvellous abstract art quotes offers me a renewed appreciation for abstraction as an imaginative gateway to unseen realms and unspoken truths.

Through colour, shape and line alone, pioneering artists established new visual languages to express intangible energies and ideas.

Freed from representing physical forms, abstract art conveys emotions, dreams, fears, passions and fantasies straight from our distinctive inner landscapes.

These quotes advocate embracing abstraction’s radical creative freedom to channel our deepest selves through paint.

Abstract art as imaginative, liberating, visionary

To me, these abstract art quotes capture why abstract art so compellingly endures into the 21st century. Far from obtuse or meaningless, abolition sparks new ways of seeing, knowing and feeling.

Abstract painting is visionary alchemy – spinning gold from base materials like charcoal, earth pigments and turpentine.

Abstraction is the phoenix perpetually reborn from society’s shifting ashes, rising to meet the age’s buried longings.

Unburdened by logic or convention, abstraction imagines bold new futures while delving into the collective unconscious. Rightly understood through these quotes, abstract art liberates audience and artist alike.

These are just a few examples of some of the most amazing, motivational and famous abstract art quotes.

Now, let me know your thoughts about this topic.

What abstract art – whether historical or contemporary – resonates most powerfully for you?

Which pieces express ineffable qualities through pure aesthetic magic?

I welcome readers to share their favourite works and why they find them meaningful. Let’s exalt abstraction’s renewed relevance as we navigate bewildering technological times together!

The power of abstract art to expand minds and perceptions

Guided by these illuminating abstract art quotes, I rededicate myself to abstraction as a profound, evolving language to stretch minds and shift perceptions – including my own.

If my non-objective work kindles new sensations, ideas or emotions for even one viewer, I’ve succeeded in channelling these pioneers’ visions.

May we continue advancing abstraction’s liberating legacy.

These are some of my inspiring quotes and great abstract art quotes.

What are yours?

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110 Abstract Quotes to Let You Know More About It

In today’s world, where everybody lives a materialistic lifestyle, it has become harder for everybody to survive or feel inspired. Everybody struggles to find inspiration or motivation to push themselves in order to achieve their goals.

All of us want to achieve the success that others are jealous of; all of us want to always keep the artist inside us alive and prosper. But on the run of achieving something greater, we tend to overthink everything, which leads to us failing to understand the importance of abstract ideas and thinking.

We have to find motivation in the smallest things in life in order to achieve something greater. There is no other stronger weapon than determination. Once a person is determined, no one can stop them from achieving something great. Abstract qualities such as enthusiasm, dedication, and courage will help one reach their destination far easier than any other thing possibly can.

Are you lost and have given up due to a lack of motivation? Is nothing inspiring you anymore? Take a quick look at our collection of abstract quotes that may help you to feel motivated and revive your wish to hustle.

Best Abstract Quotes You’ll Love

But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine. – Dominique De Menil
Life is abstract art, and it’s up to you to make sense of it. – Talismans Gibran
Abstract Art is considered as one of the pious forms in expressing one-self without any detailed illustration of reality. It uses a perceptible language such as shapes, color, line, form, and gestural marks to create a beauty that may persist with a degree of freedom from visual references in the world.
There is no shape to the feeling that has gripped me, no name. Manifested in amorphous sensations and rippling currents bringing one moment a tear, then a smile, there is no comprehending this wave. A humming’s courses through my mind. – Radhika Mukherjee
The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. This is critical to abstract art. Small differences make all the difference.
I feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable! – Robert Rauschenberg
Form itself, even if completely abstract, has its inner sound.

Surviving in today’s time is not a piece of cake. Everything nowadays is like abstract art; one needs to pay attention to the smallest things or differences to overcome the obstacles and become a winner in life.

Freedom is the hidden weapon behind something great. One needs to express their creativity with full freedom rather than holding it down. Because once you start to express your ideas freely, nothing can bind you down.

Even the smallest of things have a huge role to play in one’s life. Ignoring the small decisions or changes is like missing out on a clue during treasure hunting because that one clue itself can change the game completely.

So why look down on small things or ignore them? You need to pay attention to the little details in life. Because when you start paying attention to every single thing around you, you will get to know that even the smallest change may lead to something greater.

Abstract Quotes about Art That Will Inspire the Artist in You

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. – Jackson Pollock
Abstraction demonstrates an escape route from reality in depicting images in the artwork.
I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.– Jean-Michel Basquiat
There is no painting without drawing, and there is no shape without a line; in the end, all images can be reduced to lines. – El-Sahali
Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work. – Chuck Close
Bring your humanity to your art. Bring your art to humanity. – Maxime Lagacé
The popularity of abstract art is easily explained when you consider all art represents reality, and mystery is part of our reality. – Robert Black

Abstraction is like a mystery that needs to be solved to conclude. Once that mystery is solved, so many great things can be discovered, and the mere abstraction will match our reality.

Life itself is an artwork that we need to find the meaning of. Abstract art is a way for the artist to express themselves freely. Once one understands the abstract’s beauty, they think and look at certain things can change completely.

So you need to have the ability to look at things differently. Just a change in perspective can give birth to something greater that no one could ever imagine, like how some mere shapes and colors together can give birth to major artwork.

These quotes will help to inspire the artist in you and regain your energy to hustle.

Abstract Quotes about Painting to Motivate Your Imagination

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky. – Rabindranath Tagore
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. – Pablo Picasso
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance. – Aristotle
It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. – Vincent Van Gogh
To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. – Osho
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. – Thomas Merton

One’s imagination and creativity can lead them to somewhere great. It is created through which one can love life and make their soul grow.

Individualism is expressed through one’s art because it is the only way to present different perspectives in one frame. Because when the art depicts the artist, the actual motive behind it can be found.

Art is a way to express something greater that can’t be expressed through words. Because just like Pablo Picasso said, “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” So you should let your imagination lead you through. It is the only way to make life seem enchanted.

If you ever need some motivation for boosting your imagination, these quotes have your back.

Abstract Photography Quotes to Inspire Your Creativity

For me, light is life – and the first light that I see is the sun. So, when I think about light, I think about the sun and nothing else. Window light is the most important light for me. When I take a picture using window light, I always think about what a long trip the light is making to reach my subject. – Paolo Roversi
Shadows play an integral role in letting sunlight permeate the scene. They provide a ‘setting’ that compliments the sun-kissed lights. Often, shadows will have a golden tint or even a rosy red color that conveys a unique atmospheric glow. – Jeanne Dobie
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
Always keep the direction of the light source clearly in mind and keep asking yourself, ‘How light is it?’ and ‘How dark is it?’
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. – John Berger
I never went to school for photography. I learned lighting by working as an assistant. I learned by looking at the photographs of the Masters of Photography and the paintings of the Great Masters. You never invent: you simply take your influences from the giants before you.
Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

Photography is an art of observation where one’s way of seeing life can be expressed. It is an art form through which a moment that has gone forever can be stored.

The contrast between light and shadow gives birth to a great photo. If you are able to know light and embrace it, you will be able to know the secret to great photography.

So take your time and get inspired by the great masters so that your creativity shines through your photographs. Because embracing light and learning its importance will elevate the charm and beauty of your photography.

Abstract Quotes about Love to Share with Your Loved Ones

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
You have bewitched me body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. And wish from this day forth never to be parted from you. – Jane Austen
I saw that you were perfect, and so I loved you. Then I saw that you were not perfect, and I loved you even more. – Angelita Lim
Energy and motion made visible memories arrested in space. – Jackson Pollock
You’ve got to taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see the light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.
I love your feet because they have wandered over the earth and through the wind and water until they brought you to me. – Pablo Neruda
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate than when I fall asleep your eyes close. – Pablo Neruda

Love is such an abstract feeling that it even makes an imperfect person seem perfect. Such a mere abstract feeling helps us realize one’s importance and the difference they make in your life. Every moment spent with them seems more valuable than any other gem that exists.

When it comes to loving someone, it doesn’t matter whether that person is perfect or not. Even their existence means the world to us. We just don’t want to part our ways from them and just want to live with them in the present and enjoy every moment possible.

Remember that your loved ones will always help you be the best version of yourself, no matter what happens. These quotes are truly capable of expressing your deep thoughts to loved ones.

Funny Abstract Quotes That’ll Make You Smile.

Black and white are abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.
Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete, devotes himself utterly to money.
Have you ever noticed how easily puppies make human friends? Yet all they do is wag their tails and fall over. – Walter Anderson
I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read a book. – Groucho Marx
The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale. – Arthur C. Clarke
I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything and let it be the abstract mess that it is.
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Laughter is truly one of the best medicines for one’s mental health. It not only helps to reduce stress and anxiety but also gives you an excellent ab workout and lowers blood pressure.

All of us know that laughter is the secret to living a long and healthy life. Even a small moment of laughter can help to relieve the stress that you have been suppressing for too long.

So you should always have a positive outlook on life. Just like how, for some people, abstract art is just a product of the untalented. Rather than stressing about various things in life, learn to get a good laugh out of it. Because when life gives you lemons, make lemonade with it. These quotes will definitely give a smile to your face.

Abstract Quotes about Thinking to Share on Instagram

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.
No, it’s not, I said. It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever. – John Green
It is cut, polished; for a breath, it passes between the hands of men. – Anthony Doerr
Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank. – Philip K. Dick
Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason that is, reason divorced from experience. – Benjamin Wiker
I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. – Mark Rothko
Names are cages. Naming something limits its definition and pigeon-holes its functions.

Let’s be realistic, now-a-days everybody seems to express their abstract thoughts through social media where they can get the attention of people.

In today’s competitive world, people are often fed up with their life and the various ideologies of society. In such situations, some abstract ideas can change your outlook on life and can help you regain your motivation.

If you ever need some backup in order to grab your viewers’ attention, these quotes have your back. Your abstract thoughts can be expressed through these quotes perfectly. On the other hand, some people might get inspired by it too.

Abstract Quotes about Life You Should Read Right Now

Direction and with the same effort! – Jasleen Kaur Gumber
Do not be afraid of the word ‘theory’. Yes, it can sound dauntingly abstract at times, and in the hands of some writers can appear to have precious little to do with the actual, visual world around us. The Good theory, however, is an awesome thing. But unless we use it, it borders on the metaphysical and might as well not be used at all. – Richard Howells
Like a 3D movie fills you with wonder; ordinary things fill you with wonder when you imagine them rising from a 2D drawing, or better, from 0D or nothingness. – Shunya
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said; No man can see God face to face and live.
I have a lot of unfinished poems. And all of them are like, some love affair, that started too quick, and died too young. Each incomplete art to me is like a memory lane, of an insane passion, that words couldn’t explain, and colors couldn’t contain. – Jasleen Kaur Gumber
I tried to think these thoughts, but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.

If you are anybody looking for a little push to help to get up in life, you need to dive into these abstract life quotes! At the end of the day, it is all about having a positive outlook on everything.

Life is like a hidden picture. You will need to observe every little thing to make it make sense. It may seem abstract at times, but in the end, all you need is a unique perspective to fully understand it.

The key to success is to look at things from a different angle. That’s how you will be able to survive this battlefield called life.

Famous Abstract Quotes

To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. -Jorge Luis Borges
The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. -Lucian Freud
It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. -Gerard Way
People like abstract art because it makes them feel clever. -James Acaster
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. -Ellen Key
Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.
Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. -Debasish Mridha
I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes. -Jean Helion
Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes. -Robert Brault
The abstract has no emotional content… the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is. -Cecil Balmond

Short Abstract Quotes

All good art is abstract. -John Newman
All art is an abstraction to some degree. -Henry Moore
Abstraction is an esoteric language. -Eric Fischl
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. -Ben Shahn
You can’t look at abstract art without thinking. -Patricia Cole
Even abstract shapes must have a likeness. -Willem de Kooning
All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality. -Mike Svob
For an abstract artist the figure is merely a crutch. -C.C. Tazio Childress
The abstract nature of reality is the source of beauty. -William De Raymond
It looked like lively abstract art. Symbols in search of context.
Abstraction is the way to the heart – it is not the heart itself. -John Piper
Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction. -Paul Gauguin

Abstract Quotes on Photography

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality. -Ralph Gibson
I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so, every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself. -Ralph Gibson
I’m interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I’m not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms. -Ralph Gibson
The test of an abstract picture, for me, is not my first reaction to it, but how long I can stand it hanging on the wall of a room where I am living. -Bill Vaughan
One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time. -Annie Leibovitz
Photograph is an art of observation. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. -Elliott Erwitt
Those who look for beauty find it.
By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man; not of Tree, only a tree. -Neil Postman
To deal with the chaos of life, I escape into the prism of glass, dancing to the visual music in my mind. My photographs express my interior movement from darkness into light and back. -Polly Norman
I can’t always reach the image in my mind … almost never, in fact … so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it. -Chuck Close
If I didn’t have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I’d probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography. -E. J. Hughes

Abstract Quotes about Abstraction

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away. -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. -Gustave Flaubert
Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction. -Fulton J. Sheen
Abstraction is a luxury of the privileged. -Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Abstraction is the cost of generalization. -Grant Sanderson
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. -Edsger Dijkstra
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. -Josef Albers
Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it. -Paul Gauguin
I think, with abstraction, it’s easy to fall into a sort of pastiche. -Joe Bradley
Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured. -Paul Cezanne
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction. -Ray Kurzweil
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions. -Jean Piaget
Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities. -Tom G. Palmer

More Abstract Quotes and Sayings

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints. -Elizabeth McCracken
Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form. -Anton Ehrenzweig
The abstract artists that I admire were grounded in drawing, composition and design and it shows in their work. -Jennifer Bellinger
Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with ‘reality,’ next to the ‘real’ world. -Wasilly Kandinsky
One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative. -Piet Mondrian
Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later. -Robert A. Heinlein
Abstract art should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not. -Jackson Pollock
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. -Theodor Adorno

Final Thoughts on Abstract Quotes

Abstraction is a pathway to get to know about various things in life from a unique perspective. Through an abstract way of thinking, it becomes easier to crack the mysteries of life and be able to overcome the obstacles of life.

Moreover, if you face criticism by society for having a unique way of expressing yourself, don’t get demotivated by them. Once you start doubting your work, that’s when your downfall begins.

If you ever fall short of inspiration, read through these quotes, and you will be able to revive the artist in you.

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The Many Uses for Binoculars

Binoculars are an incredibly practical and versatile tool that can be used in a variety of settings. From birdwatching to stargazing, binoculars offer the user a unique perspective on their environment. They also have many practical uses such as hunting, surveillance, sports events, and emergency response teams. With binoculars you can see far distances with clarity and detail – all you need is two lenses.

Whether for recreational or professional purposes, the uses for binoculars are many, as they provide their users with a clear view of surroundings from potentially great distances. In this article, we will discuss some of the many uses for binoculars so that you can get the most out of your investment.

For Birdwatchers

Binoculars can be used to observe animals in their natural habitats. The advantage of using binoculars in this kind of environment is that they provide an unobtrusive way to watch birds and other wildlife without disturbing them. This allows those who bird watch to observe behaviors and identify species from a safe distance.

For Stargazers

A pair of binoculars allows viewers to observe stars and planets in the night sky with a clear view. Stargazers can use binoculars to spot constellations, galaxies, and even asteroids. You do not necessarily need to have a top-of-the-range telescope to enjoy this hobby in an amateur way. There is much to see and admire about the night sky.

If there is a galaxy far away we will, of course, not see it with a pair of binoculars but there are lots of other astrological things to be identified to start your hobby affordably.

For Hunting and Outdoor Activities

Hunters will commonly use binoculars to help them locate prey. They also come in handy while exploring new outdoor terrain as they provide users with a clear view of potential obstacles or dangers.

If you need to see ahead, then binoculars are the tool that allows you to proceed with caution or with assurance because you know what is coming.

The idea with hunting is to see your prey before it sees you, and with the right equipment and the cover of a bush or undergrowth, you can make this possible.

For Surveillance and Security

Binoculars provide an effective way to monitor spaces from afar. Law enforcement officers, security guards, and military personnel all use binoculars to keep an eye on the area they are protecting.

Surveillance is about discretion, and for this new need to right tools of the trade.

For Sports Events

Using binoculars, a better view of a sporting event can be achievable. This includes being able to view close-ups of the immediate action or a star player that you are following.

Binoculars are especially helpful in outdoor stadiums where greater distances can be involved.

For Emergency Response Teams

With a good pair of binoculars, emergency response teams can assess the situation from afar before entering a dangerous environment. It is good to be able to check on a situation from a safe distance should you have that kind of occupation. It is not always possible to use a drone, and certainly more expensive.

The beauty of binoculars is that they will provide teams with a panoramic or closer view of the area, which helps them plan a safe response.

Whether for recreational or professional use, binoculars provide users with a good view of their surroundings from distance. Using them, you can observe feathered creatures in the wild, look at the stars at night, hunt wildlife, explore the great outdoors in general, and make surveillance possible. Binoculars are something incredibly versatile to own because they can be used in a range of settings. Buying a pair of binoculars can therefore be seen as money well spent.

Subscription Box Gift Ideas for Your Foodie Loved Ones

When it comes to giving presents, it’s no secret that foodie relatives and friends are the easiest to shop for as one simply has to give them their favorite treats on their birthday or other special occasions. But if you really want to spoil your loved ones this year, why not give them a food or beverage subscription box? According to recent data, food subscription boxes are all the rage these days, and 60 percent of all purchased subscription boxes are food related. Most people are eager to get a subscription box since it allows them to sample different items every month, so if you’ve got a foodie friend or family member, here are the best subscription box gift ideas for your loved ones.

Tea of the Month Subscription Box

Tea is one of the healthiest, most comforting, and most accessible beverages in the world. In 2021, it was estimated that almost 300 billion liters of tea were consumed worldwide. It is also one of the oldest drinks in the world, and most countries have their own tea variants and special ways of preparing and drinking tea. If your friend loves to sample different types of tea , consider giving them a tea of the month subscription box. A typical box may contain two to three variants of single origin tea, information about where the tea came from, tea-related accessories such as tea filters, and some tips on brewing or steeping. Your friend will surely enjoy tasting green tea from Indonesia, Japan, or South Korea, and black tea from Southern India, among others.

Dessert Subscription Box

If your foodie relative has a sweet tooth, then there’s no better gift than a dessert subscription box. You can get them a subscription to a brand that sends different types of desserts, such as Harry & David, which is known for offering a wide range of sweet treats such as cheese cake, pies, chocolates, and caramel popcorn, among others. Meanwhile, if your loved one is an ice cream fan, you can sign them up for an ice cream of the month club subscription with Goldbelly, where they can get 5-6 pints of ice cream or 6-24 ice cream sandwiches per month from different creameries all over the US. There’s also Salt & Straw, which offers non-dairy options and vegan ice cream flavors for your vegan or lactose intolerant relative.

Pizza Subscription Box

A pizza of the month club is an awesome gift for a foodie who loves to discover unusual pizza toppings combinations. If your friend is a fan of Chicago-style pizza, give them a subscription to Amazing Clubs, where they can get three 10-inch deep dish pizzas every month. These pizzas are frozen before being shipped, so the recipient simply needs to pop them in the oven for a few minutes to enjoy their gourmet pizzas . For vegans, there’s Daily Harvest, which delivers vegan and gluten-free flatbreads. They also offer soups, smoothies, and other plant-based snacks, and you can customize the subscription box to include these items.

This year, treat your foodie loved one to a gift that keeps on giving. Consider these subscription box gift ideas for the best teas, desserts, and pizzas that will wow even the most discerning palate.

Angel -the word itself represents purity and love. Angels are something that all of us truly love and believe in. Our love for angels comes from religious faith, myths, Greek mythology itself, or from other aspects. The word “Angel” is usually used in order to represent a person’s loving and pure personality.

Angel is the symbol of purity. That’s why children are usually called angels, as nobody is as pure as a child. One of the most popular angels is “Cupid,” who is also known as the God of love.

Angels also represent love and mystery. Love is something mysterious, and so are angels. So if you think about it, angels, mystery, and love are interrelated. We don’t know for sure if they even exist or not, but we truly believe in them and thank them for the blessings. We can’t see angels or love, but they really help us go through tough times.

When we think of angels, whether we believe in them or not, they instantly warm our hearts up. The word comes with empathy and peace. Whether you believe in them or not, there is something magical and mysterious about them.

If you are an angel lover and might want to read some quotes about them, don’t worry. Here are some angel quotes from famous people that will warm your heart.

Table of Contents

Angels Quotes That Will Brighten Your Soul

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. – Tennessee Williams
Be an Angel to someone else whenever you can, as a way of thanking God for the help your angel has given you. – Eileen Elias Freeman
Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is rest and let your angels wrap you in their loving wings. They’ve got you covered. – Anna Taylor
The magnitude of life is overwhelming. Angels are here to help us take it peace by peace. – Terri Guillemets
When angels visit us, we do not hear the rustle of wings, nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts. – Mary Baker Eddy
God not only sends special angels into our lives but sometimes He even sends them back again if we forget to take notes the first time! – Eileen Elias Freeman
The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God. – Meister Eckhart
Outside the open window, the morning air is all awash with angels. – Richard Wilbur
Angels are visible to those who accept the light and break the pact made with darkness. – Paulo Coelho
The greatest achievement was at first and for a time, a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul, a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities. – James Allen

What is the first thing when you think of angels? I am sure most of you will think of the glow and shine that they have. The shine is so pure that it brightens one’s soul. From a religious perspective, it is said that they are made up of light. So what else can lighten up one’s soul than angels themselves? Nothing and nobody.

Angels have this aura and mystery around them that make us feel so good. Angels are sent into our lives in the form of people, objects, pets, and more. It is like God knows when we need them. So he sends them exactly when needed.

If you ever feel down and want to feel good, we got you. Read these quotes, and you will definitely feel better.

Guardian Angel Quotes to Bring out the Good in You

The guardian angels of life sometimes fly so high as to be beyond our sight, but they are always looking down upon us. – Jean Paul
Never travel faster than your guardian angel can fly. – Mother Teresa
Your guardian angel never ever stops communicating with you. I feel that at times they should be frustrated with us, but they seem to have endless patience and they never ever give up on us. – Lorna Byrne
Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here. Ever this night/day be at my side to light and guard, to rule and guide. – Catholic prayer
Our guardian angels are closer to us than anything except the love of God. – Eileen Elias Freeman
Everyone was born with a guardian angel. Guardian Angels brighten our journey of life with divine love, protection, peace, healing, grace, strength, and miracles. – Liliah Gifty Akita
A guardian angel to light the way keep baby safe night and day.
I have my very own guardian angel watching over me. – Samantha Mason
We cannot pass our guardian angel’s bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs. – Saint Augustine
Your two guardian angels are always with you. The other angels come and go as we need them. – Doreen Virtue

Guardian angels-the group of angels, guard us against all sorts of bad things from happening to us. It is like God has sent them in order to protect something bad from happening to us. They are sent to us in various forms. That’s why most people say that their guardian angels are on their side if they escape from something bad.

Everybody has their fair share of guardian angels who protect them from all sorts of bad stuff. Guardian angels always help us to bring out the good in us.

I am sure most of us usually feel lost and kinda sad. These quotes about guardian angels will definitely bring out the good in us and make us feel better.

Fallen Angel Quotes You Should Read

The Fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelle
Earthly majesty is always akin to the fallen angel, who is proud and unhappy, beautiful but troubled, and whose plans and efforts, though vast, are denied access. – Otto von Bismarck
He looked like a fallen angel, replete with all the dangerous male beauty that Lucifer could devise. – Lisa Kleypas
I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape. – Desmond Morris
Smells are the fallen angel of the sense. – Helen Keller
When angels go bad they are worse than anyone else. Remember Lucifer used to be an angel.
City of fallen angels ended on a cliffhanger. That was equally loved and hated by my readership. – Cassandra Clare
We have a guardian angel, and who cares if he’s a fallen one? – Anne Stuart
An elderly fallen angel traveling incognito. – Peter Quennell

What comes to mind when you think of a fallen angel? I am sure most of you will think of Lucifer. The same Lucifer that used to be an angel became a devil due to the pride it had in itself. Not all angels are good as some might be a fallen one, an angel that did something terrible to get banished from there.

Our idea of fallen angels is only limited to Lucifer but these famous people thought beyond that. They thought about the fallen angels from a different perspective that is a must to read.

Angel and Devil Sayings Ready to Share on Instagram and Whatsapp

Be careful whom you trust, the devil was once an angel. – Ziad K. Abdelnour
I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love. – Marilyn Monroe
He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty of affection. – Khalil Gibran
Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as angel, sweet as love. – Charles Maurice
Once upon a time an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.
I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood. – Ludwig Feuerbach
The angel within me thrives on the devil within me. – Kedar Joshi
I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged. – Maria Callas
In the Christian world, it is believed that angels were created at the beginning and that heaven was formed of them; and that the Devil or Satan was an angel of light, who, becoming rebellions, was cast down with his crew, and that this was the origin of hell. – Emanuel Swedenborg

Social media has become a unique platform for people of all ages and genders to share their thoughts on. They want to share all their thoughts on social media by uploading a status or sharing a couple of quotes. Among the quotes that are shared, angels and devils are usually a very common topic as that is something that most people relate to. Angels and devils are a very trendy topic nowadays as many people have really gotten into religious beliefs and other mythologies.

If you want to share quotes about devils and angels and can’t find a food one, don’t worry because we got you. These quotes about devils and angels are ready to share on any social media platform.

Angel Wings Quotes to Share with Your Friends

I’m no angel, but I’ve spread my wings a bit. – Mae West
You don’t automatically sprout angel wings when you get to the other side -you grow them here. – Suzanne Giesemann
God gave the Angels wings and humans chocolate. – Debbie Macomber
Even angels must find their wings too heavy sometimes. – Helen Van Slyke
My arms would be wrapped around him like angels’ wings. – Jess C. Scott
When we are touched by something it’s as if we’re being brushed by an angel’s wings. – Rita Dove
On my back, I have the cross and angel wings: rise above it, no matter what life throws at you. And also, you know, Jesus rose from the grave. – Lewis Hamilton
An angel of God never has wings. – Joseph Smith, Jr.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings. – John Keats

What comes to your mind when you think of an angel’s wings? For some, the answer might be excitement, for some, it might be astonishing, and for some, it might be a prized possession. An angel’s wings are an angel’s very prized possession. Without an angel’s wing, they feel incomplete and weak as it is a very important part of them.

You might understand the importance of an angel’s wings better if I give you an example. Just like it was Maleficent’s prized possession that completed her and gave her power, it is like that for other angels too. So even though it might not seem like much, it plays a huge role and has a very big significance.

Angel in Heaven Quotes That’ll Touch Your Heart

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Holy angel, in Heaven, blessed, my spirit longs with thee to rest. – Gaston Leroux
There ain’t been no angels in heaven around since God invented girls. – Elton John
I believe in angels, the kind that heaven sends…I’m surrounded by these angels, but I call them my friends. – Pamela Daranjo
Every minute I spend with you is like being in heaven and looking into an angel’s eyes.
While angels and other heavenly beings were magnificently created, they were not created in God’s image. – Henk Kruger
When someone dies, an angel is there to meet them at the gates of Heaven to let them know that their life has just begun.
The Bible says angels rejoice in heaven when one sinner comes to Christ. – Carol Nkambule

Angels and the heavens are interrelated to each other. You can’t imagine angels without the heavens and heaven without angels. There is literally no heaven without angels. They are that last piece of the puzzle. It is impossible to finish that puzzle without it. Just like that angels are the finishing touch of heaven, they complete it.

Angels are said to be the symbol of love and harmony as they are the ones who will welcome us in the gates of heaven for a new beginning. Imagining it itself will harm your heart.

You might feel sad and demotivated at times. These angel and heaven quotes will for sure warm your heart.

Short Angel Quotes to Keep in Mind Always

It’s too cold outside for angels to fly. – Ed Sheeran
Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels. – Allen Ginsberg
Every angel is terrifying. – Rainer Maria Rilke
When babies look beyond you and giggle, maybe they’re seeing angels. – Eileen Elias Freeman
Angels can fly lightly because they take God seriously. – Eileen Elias Freeman
Kindness is the touch of an angel’s hand. – James Leonard Gordon
Angels appear in many different forms to hold your hand through the difficult times. – Doreen Virtue
To find your angels… Start trusting your inner voice and intuition. – Melanie Beckler
We are each of us, angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing each other. – Luciano de Crescenzo
Angels descending, bring from above, echoes of mercy, whispers of love. – Fanny J. Crosby

There is nothing better to keep in your mind so that you feel better than some angel quotes. Angels don’t just symbolize love, unity, harmony, and purity without any reason. Angels spread love and are the epitome of purity, so nothing can make you feel better than they can.

Angels are such a precious thing for some people as they are the carrier of the blessings that we get in life and the guardian who protects us from all sorts of bad stuff.

These short angel quotes that we have compiled for you should be kept in your mind.

You Are My Angel Quotes to Send to Your Sweetheart

When I say you are my angel, I don’t just say it; I say it to remind you that you are my world and the best thing that has ever happened to me.
Thank you for being my shield and support. You are my angel, and I will always love you.
You are my angel, my darling, my star… My love will find you wherever you are.
You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence, I reach divine ecstasy, and in your absence, I descent to hell. – Isabel Allende
A man in love can do extraordinary things; I don’t care if you’re an angel, you’re my angel, and I won’t let you go. – Alexandra Adornetto
My angel, my life, my entire world, you’re the one that I want, the one that I need, let me be with you always, my love, my everything.
You are my angel; you remind me of the goodness in this world and inspire me to be the greatest version of myself. – Steve Maraboli
You are my angel that I would love to keep for the rest of my life. I love you.
It is because of you, my angel, that I now understand all of those quotes about love.
So bless you, my darling, my angel, heaven is mine, and life is divine with you. – Eddie Lane

Angels are often used to represent our significant other as there is nothing better to call them than that. They are like the angels of our life who were sent to us by God himself as a blessing that should be cherished for life.

We often want to share our thoughts and feelings about how much we love our significant other. In that case, what are better ways to express our love for them than some angel quotes? These quotes are the best option to share your love with your sweetheart.

Angel will always hold a special place in our hearts. It is impossible to imagine purity and love without angels. Angels will always help to make us feel better and feel warm at heart. We always reside in angels whenever we feel down. It always feels like they are beside us in our good times as well as tough times.

Angels are a huge hyped subject nowadays as many people have understood their importance and are using them everywhere. Different people express their love for angels in different ways.

If you ever feel down and lost and want to lighten your mood up, these quotes have your back.

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150 Life Quotes: Hope, Inspiration, & Positivity

Quote Graphic: Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough. — Emily Dickinson

Life is an intricate mix of experiences and emotions — a journey that constantly evolves and surprises us.

It’s filled with challenges that test our resilience, moments that take our breath away, and opportunities that push us toward growth.

Philosophers, writers, and thinkers throughout history have tried to capture the essence of this journey. Their quotes about life shed light on the complexities, joys, and inevitable struggles we all face — providing wisdom that can guide us, comfort us, or simply make us think.

In this article, we’ve curated a selection of life quotes that reflect the human experience. Whether you’re seeking guidance, inspiration, or a moment of reflection — may these quotes remind you of the shared human condition.

The Best Quotes About Life

Famous life quotes.

“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.” — Audre Lorde

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” — Marie Curie

“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others.” — Nelson Mandela

“Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein

“No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.” — Taylor Swift

“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” — Sydney J. Harris

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” — John Lennon

“For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.” — Vincent van Gogh

“Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” — Frederick Buechner

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” — Emily Dickinson

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” — Dalai Lama

“Life is in ourselves and not in the external.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” — Simone de Beauvoir

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.” — Oprah Winfrey

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” — Confucius

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anaïs Nin

“The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” — Bertrand Russell

“Life has got all those twists and turns. You’ve got to hold on tight and off you go.” — Nicole Kidman

Positive Quotes

“I believe we are here on the planet Earth to live, grow up and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom.” — Rosa Parks

“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible.’” — Audrey Hepburn

“Live life to the fullest, and focus on the positive.” — Matt Cameron

“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.” — Anne Frank

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you.” — Walt Whitman

“My purpose: to lift your spirit and to motivate you.” — Mavis Staples

“Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.” — Willie Nelson

“There’s always something we can do. Whatever you did, your life is still meaningful.” — Bryan Stevenson

“Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.” — Ashley Smith

“Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.” — Dale Carnegie

“Positive anything is better than negative nothing.” — Elbert Hubbard

“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” — Stephen King

“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.” — Dolly Parton

“Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you’ll start to see a big difference in your life.” — Yoko Ono

Deep Quotes

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” — Chief Seattle

“Lead from the heart, not the head.” — Diana, Princess of Wales

“It’s your outlook on life that counts. If you take yourself lightly and don’t take yourself too seriously, pretty soon you can find the humor in our everyday lives. And sometimes it can be a lifesaver.” — Betty White

“You will encounter misguided people from time to time. That’s part of life. The challenge is to educate them when you can, but always to keep your dignity and self-respect and persevere in your personal growth and development.” — Bernice King

“One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn’t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.” — Lucille Ball

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” — Albert Camus

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Soren Kierkegaard

“Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.” — Jack Kerouac

“Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” — Ernest Holmes

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.” — Michelle Obama

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them — that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” — Lao Tzu

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill

“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” — Diane Ackerman

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.” — Eudora Welty

“Life is a tide; float on it. Go down with it and go up with it, but be detached. Then it is not difficult.” — Prem Rawat

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.” — Richard L. Evans

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.” — Marie Curie

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.” — Cesare Pavese

“Love life. Engage in it. Give it all you’ve got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.” — Maya Angelou

On a Happy Life

“Don’t waste a minute not being happy. If one window closes, run to the next window — or break down a door.” — Brooke Shields

“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” — Omar Khayyam

“The most important thing is to enjoy your life — to be happy — it’s all that matters.” — Audrey Hepburn

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” — Carl Jung

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” — Abraham Lincoln

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.” — Orhan Parnuk

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.” — Marcus Aurelius

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” — Marcel Proust

“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” — Omar Khayyam

Funny Quotes

“You know the trouble with real life? There’s no danger music.” — Jim Carrey

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” — Bernard Baruch

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” — Mae West

“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.” — Terry Pratchett

“If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that’s unacceptable.” — Carrie Fisher

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” — Isaac Asimov

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” — A. A. Milne

“If I’d have done all the things I was supposed to have done, I’d be really tired.” — Willie Nelson

“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.” — Elbert Hubbard

“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.” — Dr. Seuss

“Don’t waste so much time thinking about how much you weigh. There is no more mind-numbing, boring, idiotic, self-destructive diversion from the fun of living.” — Meryl Streep

“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” — Stephen Hawking

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” — Forrest Gump

“I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.” — Lily Tomlin

“Life is like an onion; you peel off a layer at a time and sometimes you weep.” — Carl Sandburg

“I’d like to live like a poor man — only with lots of money.” — Pablo Picasso

“The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.” — Helen Hayes

“Love is being stupid together.” — Paul Valery

“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.” — Reba McEntire

Life is Too Short

“Life is too short to work so hard.” — Vivien Leigh

“Don’t ever doubt yourselves or waste a second of your life. It’s too short, and you’re too special.” — Ariana Grande

“Life is too short to worry about anything. You had better enjoy it because the next day promises nothing.” — Eric Davis

“That’s the funny thing about life. We’re rarely aware of the bullets we dodge. The just-misses. The almost-never-happeneds. We spend so much time worrying about how the future is going to play out and not nearly enough time admiring the precious perfection of the present.” — Lauren Miller

“Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.” — Phillips Brooks

“Life is too short not to enjoy it.” — Glen Campbell

“It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth — and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Everyone should be able to express themselves in the way that best suits them — life is too short to spend it unhappy.” — Jinkx Monsoon

Love Quotes

“The greatest pleasure of life is love.” — Euripides

“Believing you are unworthy of love and belonging — that who you are authentically is a sin or is wrong — is deadly. Who you are is beautiful and amazing.” — Laverne Cox

“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” — Blaise Pascal

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.” — Robert Fulghum

“So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.” — Helen Keller

“To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.” — Samuel Butler

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.” — Agatha Christie

“To love one another just may be the fight of our lives.” — Amanda Gorman

“Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.” — Lemony Snicket

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” — Bertrand Russell

“The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye, the story of love is hello, goodbye.” — Jimi Hendrix

Short Quotes

“Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.” — GZA

“A dead end is just a good place to turn around.” — Naomi Judd

“All of us have to be committed to a life beyond our own aspirations.” — Bernice King

“Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even.” — Horace

“Do one thing every day that scares you.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” — John W. Gardner

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” — Soren Kierkegaard

“The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.” — Jerry Seinfeld

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” — E. E. Cummings

“The world is what it is. But the world is also what you bring to it, and who you share it with.” — John Green

“Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life.” — Sophia Loren

“Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?” — Bob Marley

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” — Voltaire

“Success is falling nine times and getting up ten.” — Jon Bon Jovi

“To know nothing is the happiest life.” — Desiderius Erasmus

“One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.” — William Feather

“Life itself is the proper binge.” — Julia Child

“No one changes the world alone and no one doesn’t change it at all. We are all exceptional, and none of us are.” — Hank Green

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas A. Edison

“There is no way to be perfect and no fun in being perfect.” — Alicia Keys

“Life is a work in progress.” — Jeff Rich

“You can’t achieve anything in life without a small amount of sacrifice.” — Shakira

“A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.” — Elizabeth Gaskell

“People are like music. Some speak the truth, and others are just noise.” — Bill Murray

“I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.” — Emile Zola

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.” — Frank Zappa

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.” — Jack London

“We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.” — Lauryn Hill

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

“The whole point is to live life and be — to use all the colors in the crayon box.” — RuPaul

→ Read more short quotes

Advice on Life

“Here’s my advice: Study broadly and without fear. Learn a language if you can, because that will make your life more interesting. Read a little bit every day. But more importantly, surround yourself with people who you like and make cool stuff with them. In the end, what you do isn’t going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.” — John Green

“Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” — Groucho Marx

“My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.” — Judy Blume

“Life is so fresh, life is every day so new if we are fighting, only for the best. Sometimes I think the only real satisfaction in life is failure, failure in your endeavor to do your best.” — Maude Adams

“The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.” — Eminem

“Figure out who are you separate from your family, and the man or woman you’re in a relationship with. Find who you are in this world and what you need to feel good alone. I think that’s the most important thing in life. Find a sense of self. With that, you can do anything else.” — Angelina Jolie

“My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.” — Cary Grant

“I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.” — Alice Roosevelt Longworth

“I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.” — Robin Williams

More Life Quotes & Captions

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.” — Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Ah, how mysteriously the everyday things of life brush by us! On the surface, touched by light, of this complex human life, Time, a hesitant smile, blooms on the lips of the Mystery! How modern all this sounds, yet deep down it is so ancient, so hidden, so different from the meaning that shines out from all of this.” — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Children — and adults — who have a growth mindset are much more successful than those who have a fixed mindset about themselves and the world.” — Jane Goodall , The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” — Winston Churchill

“If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person. It’s how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit. ” — Bill Clinton

“I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.” — Maya Angelou

“When life hands you a difficult situation where you feel undervalued and disrespected, be bold and brave enough to know your worth.” — Yai Vargas

“Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.” — Rebecca West

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” — Edgar Allan Poe

“Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.” — Sterling K. Brown

“When you have balance in your life, work becomes an entirely different experience. There is a passion that moves you to a whole new level of fulfillment and gratitude, and that’s when you can do your best… for yourself and for others.” — Cara Delevingne

“Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.” — Will Smith

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.” — George Eliot

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — E. M. Forster

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Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old abstract quotes, abstract sayings, and abstract proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. Roger Scruton

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative. Piet Mondrian

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. Debasish Mridha

Abstract ideas are the patterns two or more memories have in common. Rudolf Flesch

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs. Denis Diderot

Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later. Robert A. Heinlein

It abstract art should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not. Jackson Pollock

Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it. Mahatma Gandhi

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. Theodor Adorno

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness. Willem de Kooning

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. Gerhard Richter

The abstract has no emotional content the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is Cecil Balmond

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. Lucian Freud

Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. Richard Diebenkorn

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. Robert Motherwell

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. Pablo Picasso

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. Sol Lewitt

All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality. Mike Svob

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use. Julian Jaynes

It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity. Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

You can't look at abstract art without thinking. Patricia Cole

Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form. Anton Ehrenzweig

The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought. John Bargh

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. Theodor Adorno

The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment... it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given. Paul Dirac

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality. Jim Hodges

An abstract title suggests another value to the subject, perhaps an artistic quality that sets the viewers' sensitivities into action. Robert Genn

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. Ben Shahn

The inconceivable idea of the sun. / You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it. Vachel Lindsay

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than we actually see. Giorgio Morandi

The nature of what we call democracy is sadly no longer an abstract discussion beloved of political science professors. Richard Wolfe

Objective painting is not a good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. Georgia O'Keeffe

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so-called figurative artists insist that what they really care about is the abstract qualities of life. Marlene Dumas

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it. Steven Wright

To bring my own prejudice into the open, abstract expressionism is a genre I have always distrusted, mainly because so much of it seems to me to express violent reactionary anarchism, a repudiating not so much of the traditions as of the community of painting. Northyrop Frye

The difference between non-objective and abstract painting may be suggested by the difference between mathematics and music. Northrop Frye

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Edmund Burke

A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Al Capp

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. Paul Klee

I think the greatest feature of a lot of the images is that they're not completely explainable and that they can have different meanings for different people. Keith Haring

The kind of images I'm drawing has changed a lot. I've become much more conscious of who's seeing them and thinking about them: realizing that the drawings are a great vehicle for getting ideas across, not just abstract ideas, but actual ideas or philosophies. Keith Haring

I'd gone from the abstract drawings to the word pieces, but I decided that I was going to draw again. But if I was going to draw again, I couldn't go back to the abstract drawings; they had to have some connection to the real world. Keith Haring

I have found another kind of enjoyment through illness that is more important and unmeasurable. I have found that I am closer to abstract things in my sickness than in health. Khalil Gibran

Black and white are abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world. Joel Sternfeld

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery. Eric Cantona

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. Gerard Way

One of the things I like about music is its abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing. Bernard Sumner

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms is the shadows they create to hide a vacuum. Joseph Joubert

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. Salvador Dali

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting. Max Beckmann

Life is abstract art, and it’s up to you to make sense of it. Talismanist Giebra

The form itself, even if completely abstract ... has its own inner sound. Wassily Kandinsky

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. Arshile Gorky

Abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. Piet Mondrian

Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion, and mystery, rather than obvious description. Robert Genn

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. Jackson Pollock

Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout. Lawren Harris

I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed the imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes. Jean Helion

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Abstraction Quotes

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Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Here is God's purpose - For God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; is loving, not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated; is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy.

I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.

Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.

Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as love. Love is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self increasing.

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.

Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

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13 Beautiful Quotes About Art

By Google Arts & Culture

Pablo Picasso (1949) by Gjon Mili LIFE Photo Collection

Looking at a beautiful painting, or staring up at a huge, awe-inspiring sculpture, we’re often left struggling for words. These personal and emotional experiences are hard to express in language. But many people, both artists and non-artists, have managed to put words together that seem to capture this amazing, inexpressible feeling.

Here are 13 beautiful, inspirational and moving quotes that will make you fall in love with art all over again, from Picasso to Pollock.

Albion Rose (1794-1796) by William Blake British Museum

2. “A picture is a poem without words.” – Horace

The Balcony Room (1845) by Adolph Menzel Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

3. “The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.” – Jawaharlal Nehru

Purple Hills Ghost Ranch - 2 / Purple Hills No II (1934) by Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

4. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.” – Georgia O'Keeffe

Nu descendant un escalier - Marcel Duchamp, 1912 (conservé au Philadelphia Museum of Art) by Marcel Duchamp The Cinémathèque française

5. “What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.” – Marcel Duchamp

Trees in Autumn (1920-1921) by Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

6. “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” – Henry Ward Beecher

8. “The work of art is a scream of freedom.” – Christo

The Ballet Class (1871 - 1874) by Edgar Degas Musée d’Orsay, Paris

9. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas

The Reading Room (1843) by Johann Peter Hasenclever Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

10. “Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.” – Victor Pinchuk

Por Vinci Leonardo Da LIFE Photo Collection

11. “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Jackson Pollock (1949-04) by Martha Holmes LIFE Photo Collection

12. “Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” – Jackson Pollock

13. “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange

Explore more: - 8 Albert Einstein Quotes

Serpentine Galleries

Dishing up the thyssen, museo nacional thyssen-bornemisza, five important works from the georgia o’keeffe museum, georgia o'keeffe museum, from station to the renovated musée d'orsay, musée d’orsay, paris, 70mm todd-ao film, the cinémathèque française, welcome to the alte nationalgalerie, alte nationalgalerie, staatliche museen zu berlin, a journey: conserving the atlas of joseph russegger’s seminal publication reisen in europa, asien und africa etc. (1842-1849), british museum, zaha hadid virtual reality experiences: the peak 1982-83, georgia o’keeffe’s life in art, georges méliès, the return of the monk, the ballcourts of chichén itzá.

My Top 10 Abstract Artist Quotes in 2021

Cat. No. 1363 San Simeone Piccolo, Venice, Italy - 14cm x 14cm - Oil on Canvas - 2020

My Top Ten Quotes by Abstract Artists

“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. — Lucien Freud

“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock

It is true that abstract painting sometimes can take a while to understand. But only good abstract painting can be understood. I never appreciated Pollack’s work until I sat down on a sofa in the Guggenheim Museum in Venice and decided to give myself at least 15 minutes to stare at one of his paintings and see if my first impression, that it was just a mess of paint, was wrong. The painting was a very large canvas covered with lots small black and white shapes. For a while nothing happened. Then after 10 minutes I started to imagine I was perhaps looking at streets and buildings. I thought I could see streets appearing and disappearing, buildings coming into view and then getting lost in the maze of a city. I went up to the painting to see what it was called:

After that I learned to give a painting time, just like it takes time to learn how to appreciate a good symphony. But I think that Pollack was the end of an era, when artists did have some knowledge about painting and strove to create something artistically worthwhile. I can’t say I like all of his work, but it does have some quality. That quality derives from its underlying structure which is not at all random. Later I discovered that his method of working was a movement known as a kick pendulum, which produces a pattern that has some underlying mathematical structure. Structure is what is at the heart of all good art. Pollack probably didn’t know what he was doing, but by chance his working method created something that creates an interesting work of art, even if it does take a while to appreciate.

After his era, painting degenerated. You could sit for two hours and look at the work of Jasper Johns and others that came later, and still just see a not very well designed pattern. That’s when art started to be mostly b******t.

“In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered. — Melissa Brown

Never was uttered a truer word. This is the essence of landscape painting.

Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words, but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression. — Etel Adnan

I would say that abstract art is closer to the equivalent of musical expression. Good abstract work contains rhythms, harmonies, intervals, transitions, repetitions, variety, unity. All those are characteristics of music. Poetry is the realm of stories, emotions and feelings. You don’t get much of that from an abstract painting. It’s just interesting to look at.

Abstract understanding doesn’t mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience. — Robert Genn

Nicely said Robert!

“Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts. — Richard Diebenkhorn

Diebenkorn was an expert in space division in a painting. You can learn an awful lot about good landscape painting by looking at his mid career work. The later stuff was a bit boring.

The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. — Paul Klee

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness. — Willem de Kooning

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction. — Paul Gaugin

I am not an abstractionist… .I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else… .I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on . — Mark Rothko

Well, with all due respect, I think you failed Mr Rothko. I didn’t feel any of those emotions when I spent an hour in a room of your red paintings. They did not touch on any emotions because you had no idea of the subject, so how could they affect our emotions?

But I did find them a fascinating arrangements of shapes, edges, transitions, that were somewhat suggestive of landscapes or light playing in a space. It was very enjoyable just sitting in front of one of your paintings and letting your imagination wander. But it was hard work really.

So you succeeded in doing what you were not interested in, and failed in doing what you were interested in. Or you just said that to the media and did not mean it.

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Abstract Quotes By Famous Artists

Abstract art is a type of art that does not represent any natural object. It can be expressed in various forms like paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

Abstract art was first introduced in the early twentieth century and gained prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unlike traditional art forms, abstract expressionism is all about artistic independence to go wild on imagination.

Abstract forms have become quite popular due to their versatility in design elements. They can be used for interior decoration, such as wallpapers, or exterior decoration, like sculptures or fountains.

If you are looking for inspiration for your next project, you have come to the right place! Below, I have compiled a list of the 30 best abstract quotes for your motivation:

1 . “There is no must in art because art is free.” Wassily Kandinsky

2 . “The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. This is critical to abstract art. Small differences make all the difference.” Kirk Varnedoe

3 . “Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” Jackson Pollock

4 . “Abstract ideas are the patterns two or more memories have in common.” Rudolf Flesch

5 . “All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.” Denis Diderot

6 . “Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense, every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.” Richard Diebenkorn

7 . “The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.” Paul Klee

8 . “It abstract art should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.” Jackson Pollock

9 . “None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.” Theodor Adorno

10 . “An abstract title suggests another value to the subject, perhaps an artistic quality that sets the viewers’ sensitivities into action.” Robert Genn

11 . “To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.” Ben Shahn

12 . “Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it.” Mahatma Gandhi

13 . “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” Pablo Picasso

14 . “Abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.” Piet Mondrian

15 . “The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment. It is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.” Paul Dirac

16 . “Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.” Julian Jaynes

17 . “It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity.” Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

18 . “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” Sol Lewitt

19 . “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.” Lucian Freud

20 . “Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.” Alexander Calder

21 . “The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.” Kenneth Tynan

22 . “I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don’t see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.” Antoni Tapies

23 . “Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.” Anton Ehrenzweig

24 . “Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes… Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.” Arshile Gorky

25 . “In retrospect, I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality but should be looking at what’s behind something.” Andreas Gursky

26 . “Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.” Alex Grey

27 . “My advice to those who which to learn the art of scientific prophecy is not to rely on abstract reason but to decipher the secret language of Nature from Nature’s documents: the facts of experience.” Max Born

28 . “All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of true reality.” Mike Svob

29 . “The difference between non-objective and abstract painting may be suggested by the difference between mathematics and music.” Northrop Frye

30 . “I think the greatest feature of a lot of the images is that they’re not completely explainable and that they can have different meanings for different people.” Keith Haring

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The Meaning of Life

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Relatedly, think about Koheleth, the presumed author of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, describing life as “futility” and akin to “the pursuit of wind,” Nietzsche on nihilism, as well as Schopenhauer when he remarks that whenever we reach a goal we have longed for we discover “how vain and empty it is.” While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and virtue (and their opposites), they are straightforwardly construed (roughly) as accounts of which highly ranked purposes a person ought to realize that would make her life significant (if any would).

Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only since the 1980s or so that a distinct field of the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy, on which this survey focuses, and it is only in the past 20 years that debate with real depth and intricacy has appeared. Two decades ago analytic reflection on life’s meaning was described as a “backwater” compared to that on well-being or good character, and it was possible to cite nearly all the literature in a given critical discussion of the field (Metz 2002). Neither is true any longer. Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy of life’s meaning has become vibrant, such that there is now way too much literature to be able to cite comprehensively in this survey. To obtain focus, it tends to discuss books, influential essays, and more recent works, and it leaves aside contributions from other philosophical traditions (such as the Continental or African) and from non-philosophical fields (e.g., psychology or literature). This survey’s central aim is to acquaint the reader with current analytic approaches to life’s meaning, sketching major debates and pointing out neglected topics that merit further consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”. The literature on life's meaning composed by those working in the analytic tradition (on which this entry focuses) can be usefully organized according to which question it seeks to answer. This survey starts off with recent work that addresses the first, abstract (or “meta”) question regarding the sense of talk of “life’s meaning,” i.e., that aims to clarify what we have in mind when inquiring into the meaning of life (section 1). Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaningfulness (sections 2–3). There is in the making a sub-field of applied meaning that parallels applied ethics, in which meaningfulness is considered in the context of particular cases or specific themes. Examples include downshifting (Levy 2005), implementing genetic enhancements (Agar 2013), making achievements (Bradford 2015), getting an education (Schinkel et al. 2015), interacting with research participants (Olson 2016), automating labor (Danaher 2017), and creating children (Ferracioli 2018). In contrast, this survey focuses nearly exclusively on contemporary normative-theoretical approaches to life’s meanining, that is, attempts to capture in a single, general principle all the variegated conditions that could confer meaning on life. Finally, this survey examines fresh arguments for the nihilist view that the conditions necessary for a meaningful life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless (section 4).

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

2.1. god-centered views, 2.2. soul-centered views, 3.1. subjectivism, 3.2. objectivism, 3.3. rejecting god and a soul, 4. nihilism, works cited, classic works, collections, books for the general reader, other internet resources, related entries.

One of the field's aims consists of the systematic attempt to identify what people (essentially or characteristically) have in mind when they think about the topic of life’s meaning. For many in the field, terms such as “importance” and “significance” are synonyms of “meaningfulness” and so are insufficiently revealing, but there are those who draw a distinction between meaningfulness and significance (Singer 1996, 112–18; Belliotti 2019, 145–50, 186). There is also debate about how the concept of a meaningless life relates to the ideas of a life that is absurd (Nagel 1970, 1986, 214–23; Feinberg 1980; Belliotti 2019), futile (Trisel 2002), and not worth living (Landau 2017, 12–15; Matheson 2017).

A useful way to begin to get clear about what thinking about life’s meaning involves is to specify the bearer. Which life does the inquirer have in mind? A standard distinction to draw is between the meaning “in” life, where a human person is what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning “of” life in a narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not. There has also been a bit of recent consideration of whether animals or human infants can have meaning in their lives, with most rejecting that possibility (e.g., Wong 2008, 131, 147; Fischer 2019, 1–24), but a handful of others beginning to make a case for it (Purves and Delon 2018; Thomas 2018). Also under-explored is the issue of whether groups, such as a people or an organization, can be bearers of meaning, and, if so, under what conditions.

Most analytic philosophers have been interested in meaning in life, that is, in the meaningfulness that a person’s life could exhibit, with comparatively few these days addressing the meaning of life in the narrow sense. Even those who believe that God is or would be central to life’s meaning have lately addressed how an individual’s life might be meaningful in virtue of God more often than how the human race might be. Although some have argued that the meaningfulness of human life as such merits inquiry to no less a degree (if not more) than the meaning in a life (Seachris 2013; Tartaglia 2015; cf. Trisel 2016), a large majority of the field has instead been interested in whether their lives as individual persons (and the lives of those they care about) are meaningful and how they could become more so.

Focusing on meaning in life, it is quite common to maintain that it is conceptually something good for its own sake or, relatedly, something that provides a basic reason for action (on which see Visak 2017). There are a few who have recently suggested otherwise, maintaining that there can be neutral or even undesirable kinds of meaning in a person’s life (e.g., Mawson 2016, 90, 193; Thomas 2018, 291, 294). However, these are outliers, with most analytic philosophers, and presumably laypeople, instead wanting to know when an individual’s life exhibits a certain kind of final value (or non-instrumental reason for action).

Another claim about which there is substantial consensus is that meaningfulness is not all or nothing and instead comes in degrees, such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others. Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people’s lives are less meaningful (or even in a certain sense less “important”) than others, or are even meaningless (unimportant), and still maintain that people have an equal standing from a moral point of view. Consider a consequentialist moral principle according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life, or a Kantian approach according to which all people have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for autonomous decision-making, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity. For both moral outlooks, we could be required to help people with relatively meaningless lives.

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

Supposing, then, that talk of “meaning in life” connotes something good for its own sake that can come in degrees and that is not analytically equivalent to happiness or rightness, what else does it involve? What more can we say about this final value, by definition? Most contemporary analytic philosophers would say that the relevant value is absent from spending time in an experience machine (but see Goetz 2012 for a different view) or living akin to Sisyphus, the mythic figure doomed by the Greek gods to roll a stone up a hill for eternity (famously discussed by Albert Camus and Taylor 1970). In addition, many would say that the relevant value is typified by the classic triad of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” (or would be under certain conditions). These terms are not to be taken literally, but instead are rough catchwords for beneficent relationships (love, collegiality, morality), intellectual reflection (wisdom, education, discoveries), and creativity (particularly the arts, but also potentially things like humor or gardening).

Pressing further, is there something that the values of the good, the true, the beautiful, and any other logically possible sources of meaning involve? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One salient view is that the concept of meaning in life is a cluster or amalgam of overlapping ideas, such as fulfilling higher-order purposes, meriting substantial esteem or admiration, having a noteworthy impact, transcending one’s animal nature, making sense, or exhibiting a compelling life-story (Markus 2003; Thomson 2003; Metz 2013, 24–35; Seachris 2013, 3–4; Mawson 2016). However, there are philosophers who maintain that something much more monistic is true of the concept, so that (nearly) all thought about meaningfulness in a person’s life is essentially about a single property. Suggestions include being devoted to or in awe of qualitatively superior goods (Taylor 1989, 3–24), transcending one’s limits (Levy 2005), or making a contribution (Martela 2016).

Recently there has been something of an “interpretive turn” in the field, one instance of which is the strong view that meaning-talk is logically about whether and how a life is intelligible within a wider frame of reference (Goldman 2018, 116–29; Seachris 2019; Thomas 2019; cf. Repp 2018). According to this approach, inquiring into life’s meaning is nothing other than seeking out sense-making information, perhaps a narrative about life or an explanation of its source and destiny. This analysis has the advantage of promising to unify a wide array of uses of the term “meaning.” However, it has the disadvantages of being unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12–15), that it is not logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126–42; Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions themselves (as distinct from an interpretation of them), such as rescuing a child from a burning building, are what bear meaning.

Some thinkers have suggested that a complete analysis of the concept of life’s meaning should include what has been called “anti-matter” (Metz 2002, 805–07, 2013, 63–65, 71–73) or “anti-meaning” (Campbell and Nyholm 2015; Egerstrom 2015), conditions that reduce the meaningfulness of a life. The thought is that meaning is well represented by a bipolar scale, where there is a dimension of not merely positive conditions, but also negative ones. Gratuitous cruelty or destructiveness are prima facie candidates for actions that not merely fail to add meaning, but also subtract from any meaning one’s life might have had.

Despite the ongoing debates about how to analyze the concept of life’s meaning (or articulate the definition of the phrase “meaning in life”), the field remains in a good position to make progress on the other key questions posed above, viz., of what would make a life meaningful and whether any lives are in fact meaningful. A certain amount of common ground is provided by the point that meaningfulness at least involves a gradient final value in a person’s life that is conceptually distinct from happiness and rightness, with exemplars of it potentially being the good, the true, and the beautiful. The rest of this discussion addresses philosophical attempts to capture the nature of this value theoretically and to ascertain whether it exists in at least some of our lives.

2. Supernaturalism

Most analytic philosophers writing on meaning in life have been trying to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general principles, that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a life could obtain meaning. As in moral philosophy, there are recognizable “anti-theorists,” i.e., those who maintain that there is too much pluralism among meaning conditions to be able to unify them in the form of a principle (e.g., Kekes 2000; Hosseini 2015). Arguably, though, the systematic search for unity is too nascent to be able to draw a firm conclusion about whether it is available.

The theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, that is, in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views according to which a spiritual realm is central to meaning in life. Most Western philosophers have conceived of the spiritual in terms of God or a soul as commonly understood in the Abrahamic faiths (but see Mulgan 2015 for discussion of meaning in the context of a God uninterested in us). In contrast, naturalist theories are views that the physical world as known particularly well by the scientific method is central to life’s meaning.

There is logical space for a non-naturalist theory, according to which central to meaning is an abstract property that is neither spiritual nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this possibility in the recent Anglo-American-Australasian literature (Audi 2005).

It is important to note that supernaturalism, a claim that God (or a soul) would confer meaning on a life, is logically distinct from theism, the claim that God (or a soul) exists. Although most who hold supernaturalism also hold theism, one could accept the former without the latter (as Camus more or less did), committing one to the view that life is meaningless or at least lacks substantial meaning. Similarly, while most naturalists are atheists, it is not contradictory to maintain that God exists but has nothing to do with meaning in life or perhaps even detracts from it. Although these combinations of positions are logically possible, some of them might be substantively implausible. The field could benefit from discussion of the comparative attractiveness of various combinations of evaluative claims about what would make life meaningful and metaphysical claims about whether spiritual conditions exist.

Over the past 15 years or so, two different types of supernaturalism have become distinguished on a regular basis (Metz 2019). That is true not only in the literature on life’s meaning, but also in that on the related pro-theism/anti-theism debate, about whether it would be desirable for God or a soul to exist (e.g., Kahane 2011; Kraay 2018; Lougheed 2020). On the one hand, there is extreme supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for any meaning in life. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life is meaningless. On the other hand, there is moderate supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for a great or ultimate meaning in life, although not meaning in life as such. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life could have some meaning, or even be meaningful, but no one’s life could exhibit the most desirable meaning. For a moderate supernaturalist, God or a soul would substantially enhance meaningfulness or be a major contributory condition for it.

There are a variety of ways that great or ultimate meaning has been described, sometimes quantitatively as “infinite” (Mawson 2016), qualitatively as “deeper” (Swinburne 2016), relationally as “unlimited” (Nozick 1981, 618–19; cf. Waghorn 2014), temporally as “eternal” (Cottingham 2016), and perspectivally as “from the point of view of the universe” (Benatar 2017). There has been no reflection as yet on the crucial question of how these distinctions might bear on each another, for instance, on whether some are more basic than others or some are more valuable than others.

Cross-cutting the extreme/moderate distinction is one between God-centered theories and soul-centered ones. According to the former, some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) constitutes meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance that contains one’s identity). In contrast, by the latter, having a soul and putting it into a certain state is what makes life meaningful, even if God does not exist. Many supernaturalists of course believe that God and a soul are jointly necessary for a (greatly) meaningful existence. However, the simpler view, that only one of them is necessary, is common, and sometimes arguments proffered for the complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler one.

The most influential God-based account of meaning in life has been the extreme view that one’s existence is significant if and only if one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God has a plan for the universe and that one’s life is meaningful just to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in a particular way that God wants one to do so. If a person failed to do what God intends her to do with her life (or if God does not even exist), then, on the current view, her life would be meaningless.

Thinkers differ over what it is about God’s purpose that might make it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives, but the most influential argument has been that only God’s purpose could be the source of invariant moral rules (Davis 1987, 296, 304–05; Moreland 1987, 124–29; Craig 1994/2013, 161–67) or of objective values more generally (Cottingham 2005, 37–57), where a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical. According to this argument, lower goods such as animal pleasure or desire satisfaction could exist without God, but higher ones pertaining to meaning in life, particularly moral virtue, could not. However, critics point to many non-moral sources of meaning in life (e.g., Kekes 2000; Wolf 2010), with one arguing that a universal moral code is not necessary for meaning in life, even if, say, beneficent actions are (Ellin 1995, 327). In addition, there are a variety of naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of objective morality––and of value more generally––on offer these days, so that it is not clear that it must have a supernatural source in God’s will.

One recurrent objection to the idea that God’s purpose could make life meaningful is that if God had created us with a purpose in mind, then God would have degraded us and thereby undercut the possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose. The objection harks back to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in the analytic literature it appears that Kurt Baier was the first to articulate it (1957/2000, 118–20; see also Murphy 1982, 14–15; Singer 1996, 29; Kahane 2011; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). Sometimes the concern is the threat of punishment God would make so that we do God’s bidding, while other times it is that the source of meaning would be constrictive and not up to us, and still other times it is that our dignity would be maligned simply by having been created with a certain end in mind (for some replies to such concerns, see Hanfling 1987, 45–46; Cottingham 2005, 37–57; Lougheed 2020, 111–21).

There is a different argument for an extreme God-based view that focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite, unlimited, or ineffable, which Robert Nozick first articulated with care (Nozick 1981, 594–618; see also Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014). The core idea is that for a finite condition to be meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has meaning. So, if one’s life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on. A regress on meaningful conditions is present, and the suggestion is that the regress can terminate only in something so all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God. The standard objection to this relational rationale is that a finite condition could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another meaningful condition. Perhaps it could be meaningful in itself, without being connected to something beyond it, or maybe it could obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is beautiful or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful (Nozick 1989, 167–68; Thomson 2003, 25–26, 48).

A serious concern for any extreme God-based view is the existence of apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 31–37, 49–50; Landau 2017). Even religiously inclined philosophers have found this hard to deny these days (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005; Mawson 2016, 5; Williams 2020, 132–34).

Largely for that reason, contemporary supernaturalists have tended to opt for moderation, that is, to maintain that God would greatly enhance the meaning in our lives, even if some meaning would be possible in a world without God. One approach is to invoke the relational argument to show that God is necessary, not for any meaning whatsoever, but rather for an ultimate meaning. “Limited transcendence, the transcending of our limits so as to connect with a wider context of value which itself is limited, does give our lives meaning––but a limited one. We may thirst for more” (Nozick 1981, 618). Another angle is to appeal to playing a role in God’s plan, again to claim, not that it is essential for meaning as such, but rather for “a cosmic significance....intead of a significance very limited in time and space” (Swinburne 2016, 154; see also Quinn 2000; Cottingham 2016, 131). Another rationale is that by fulfilling God’s purpose, we would meaningfully please God, a perfect person, as well as be remembered favorably by God forever (Cottingham 2016, 135; Williams 2020, 21–22, 29, 101, 108). Still another argument is that only with God could the deepest desires of human nature be satisfied (e.g., Goetz 2012; Seachris 2013, 20; Cottingham 2016, 127, 136), even if more surface desires could be satisfied without God.

In reply to such rationales for a moderate supernaturalism, there has been the suggestion that it is precisely by virtue of being alone in the universe that our lives would be particularly significant; otherwise, God’s greatness would overshadow us (Kahane 2014). There has also been the response that, with the opportunity for greater meaning from God would also come that for greater anti-meaning, so that it is not clear that a world with God would offer a net gain in respect of meaning (Metz 2019, 34–35). For example, if pleasing God would greatly enhance meaning in our lives, then presumably displeasing God would greatly reduce it and to a comparable degree. In addition, there are arguments for extreme naturalism (or its “anti-theist” cousin) mentioned below (sub-section 3.3).

Notice that none of the above arguments for supernaturalism appeals to the prospect of eternal life (at least not explicitly). Arguments that do make such an appeal are soul-centered, holding that meaning in life mainly comes from having an immortal, spiritual substance that is contiguous with one’s body when it is alive and that will forever outlive its death. Some think of the afterlife in terms of one’s soul entering a transcendent, spiritual realm (Heaven), while others conceive of one’s soul getting reincarnated into another body on Earth. According to the extreme version, if one has a soul but fails to put it in the right state (or if one lacks a soul altogether), then one’s life is meaningless.

There are three prominent arguments for an extreme soul-based perspective. One argument, made famous by Leo Tolstoy, is the suggestion that for life to be meaningful something must be worth doing, that something is worth doing only if it will make a permanent difference to the world, and that making a permanent difference requires being immortal (see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Critics most often appeal to counterexamples, suggesting for instance that it is surely worth your time and effort to help prevent people from suffering, even if you and they are mortal. Indeed, some have gone on the offensive and argued that helping people is worth the sacrifice only if and because they are mortal, for otherwise they could invariably be compensated in an afterlife (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Another recent and interesting criticism is that the major motivations for the claim that nothing matters now if one day it will end are incoherent (Greene 2021).

A second argument for the view that life would be meaningless without a soul is that it is necessary for justice to be done, which, in turn, is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by God or a Karmic force. Something like this argument can be found in Ecclesiastes, and it continues to be defended (e.g., Davis 1987; Craig 1994). However, even granting that an afterlife is required for perfectly just outcomes, it is far from obvious that an eternal afterlife is necessary for them, and, then, there is the suggestion that some lives, such as Mandela’s, have been meaningful precisely in virtue of encountering injustice and fighting it.

A third argument for thinking that having a soul is essential for any meaning is that it is required to have the sort of free will without which our lives would be meaningless. Immanuel Kant is known for having maintained that if we were merely physical beings, subjected to the laws of nature like everything else in the material world, then we could not act for moral reasons and hence would be unimportant. More recently, one theologian has eloquently put the point in religious terms: “The moral spirit finds the meaning of life in choice. It finds it in that which proceeds from man and remains with him as his inner essence rather than in the accidents of circumstances turns of external fortune....(W)henever a human being rubs the lamp of his moral conscience, a Spirit does appear. This Spirit is God....It is in the ‘Thou must’ of God and man’s ‘I can’ that the divine image of God in human life is contained” (Swenson 1949/2000, 27–28). Notice that, even if moral norms did not spring from God’s commands, the logic of the argument entails that one’s life could be meaningful, so long as one had the inherent ability to make the morally correct choice in any situation. That, in turn, arguably requires something non-physical about one’s self, so as to be able to overcome whichever physical laws and forces one might confront. The standard objection to this reasoning is to advance a compatibilism about having a determined physical nature and being able to act for moral reasons (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77). It is also worth wondering whether, if one had to have a spiritual essence in order to make free choices, it would have to be one that never perished.

Like God-centered theorists, many soul-centered theorists these days advance a moderate view, accepting that some meaning in life would be possible without immortality, but arguing that a much greater meaning would be possible with it. Granting that Einstein, Mandela, and Picasso had somewhat meaningful lives despite not having survived the deaths of their bodies (as per, e.g., Trisel 2004; Wolf 2015, 89–140; Landau 2017), there remains a powerful thought: more is better. If a finite life with the good, the true, and the beautiful has meaning in it to some degree, then surely it would have all the more meaning if it exhibited such higher values––including a relationship with God––for an eternity (Cottingham 2016, 132–35; Mawson 2016, 2019, 52–53; Williams 2020, 112–34; cf. Benatar 2017, 35–63). One objection to this reasoning is that the infinity of meaning that would be possible with a soul would be “too big,” rendering it difficult for the moderate supernaturalist to make sense of the intution that a finite life such as Einstein’s can indeed count as meaningful by comparison (Metz 2019, 30–31; cf. Mawson 2019, 53–54). More common, though, is the objection that an eternal life would include anti-meaning of various kinds, such as boredom and repetition, discussed below in the context of extreme naturalism (sub-section 3.3).

3. Naturalism

Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life’s meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019). The moderate version is that, while a genuinely meaningful life could be had in a purely physical universe as known well by science, a somewhat more meaningful life would be possible if a spiritual realm also existed. God or a soul could enhance meaning in life, although they would not be major contributors. The extreme version of naturalism is the view that it would be better in respect of life’s meaning if there were no spiritual realm. From this perspective, God or a soul would be anti-matter, i.e., would detract from the meaning available to us, making a purely physical world (even if not this particular one) preferable.

Cross-cutting the moderate/extreme distinction is that between subjectivism and objectivism, which are theoretical accounts of the nature of meaningfulness insofar as it is physical. They differ in terms of the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings. Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on an individual’s pro-attitudes such as her particular desires or ends, which are not shared by everyone. Roughly, something is meaningful for a person if she strongly wants it or intends to seek it out and she gets it. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is at least partly mind-independent, i.e., obtains not merely in virtue of being the object of anyone’s mental states. Here, something is meaningful (partially) because of its intrinsic nature, in the sense of being independent of whether it is wanted or intended; meaning is instead (to some extent) the sort of thing that merits these reactions.

There is logical space for an orthogonal view, according to which there are invariant standards of meaningfulness constituted by what all human beings would converge on from a certain standpoint. However, it has not been much of a player in the field (Darwall 1983, 164–66).

According to this version of naturalism, meaning in life varies from person to person, depending on each one’s variable pro-attitudes. Common instances are views that one’s life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly, achieves one’s highly ranked goals, or does what one believes to be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008). One influential subjectivist has recently maintained that the relevant mental state is caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94, 2004). Another recent proposal is that meaningfulness consists of “an active engagement and affirmation that vivifies the person who has freely created or accepted and now promotes and nurtures the projects of her highest concern” (Belliotti 2019, 183).

Subjectivism was dominant in the middle of the twentieth century, when positivism, noncognitivism, existentialism, and Humeanism were influential (Ayer 1947; Hare 1957; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Williams 1976). However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, inference to the best explanation and reflective equilibrium became accepted forms of normative argumentation and were frequently used to defend claims about the existence and nature of objective value (or of “external reasons,” ones obtaining independently of one’s extant attitudes). As a result, subjectivism about meaning lost its dominance. Those who continue to hold subjectivism often remain suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value (e.g., Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378–79; Frankfurt 2004, 47–48, 55–57; Wong 2008, 138–39; Evers 2017, 32, 36; Svensson 2017, 54). Theorists are moved to accept subjectivism typically because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are reasonably sure that meaning in life obtains for some people, but do not see how it could be grounded on something independent of the mind, whether it be the natural or the supernatural (or the non-natural). In contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what people want out of their lives. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.

There is a cluster of other, more circumscribed arguments for subjectivism, according to which this theory best explains certain intuitive features of meaning in life. For one, subjectivism seems plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an authentic one (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94). If a person’s life is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a function of those matters for which the person cares. For another, it is uncontroversial that often meaning comes from losing oneself, i.e., in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience, as opposed to being bored by it or finding it frustrating (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94; Belliotti 2019, 162–70). Work that concentrates the mind and relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so because of the subjective elements involved. For a third, meaning is often taken to be something that makes life worth continuing for a specific person, i.e., that gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which subjectivism is thought to account for best (Williams 1976; Svensson 2017; Calhoun 2018).

Critics maintain that these arguments are vulnerable to a common objection: they neglect the role of objective value (or an external reason) in realizing oneself, losing oneself, and having a reason to live (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wolf 2010, 2015, 89–140). One is not really being true to oneself, losing oneself in a meaningful way, or having a genuine reason to live insofar as one, say, successfully maintains 3,732 hairs on one’s head (Taylor 1992, 36), cultivates one’s prowess at long-distance spitting (Wolf 2010, 104), collects a big ball of string (Wolf 2010, 104), or, well, eats one’s own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22). The counterexamples suggest that subjective conditions are insufficient to ground meaning in life; there seem to be certain actions, relationships, and states that are objectively valuable (but see Evers 2017, 30–32) and toward which one’s pro-attitudes ought to be oriented, if meaning is to accrue.

So say objectivists, but subjectivists feel the pull of the point and usually seek to avoid the counterexamples, lest they have to bite the bullet by accepting the meaningfulness of maintaining 3,732 hairs on one’s head and all the rest (for some who do, see Svensson 2017, 54–55; Belliotti 2019, 181–83). One important strategy is to suggest that subjectivists can avoid the counterexamples by appealing to the right sort of pro-attitude. Instead of whatever an individual happens to want, perhaps the relevant mental state is an emotional-perceptual one of seeing-as (Alexis 2011; cf. Hosseini 2015, 47–66), a “categorical” desire, that is, an intrinsic desire constitutive of one’s identity that one takes to make life worth continuing (Svensson 2017), or a judgment that one has a good reason to value something highly for its own sake (Calhoun 2018). Even here, though, objectivists will argue that it might “appear that whatever the will chooses to treat as a good reason to engage itself is, for the will, a good reason. But the will itself....craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward unless it thought it had them” (Wiggins 1988, 136). And without any appeal to objectivity, it is perhaps likely that counterexamples would resurface.

Another subjectivist strategy by which to deal with the counterexamples is the attempt to ground meaningfulness, not on the pro-attitudes of an individual valuer, but on those of a group (Darwall 1983, 164–66; Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Does such an intersubjective move avoid (more of) the counterexamples? If so, does it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?

Objective naturalists believe that meaning in life is constituted at least in part by something physical beyond merely the fact that it is the object of a pro-attitude. Obtaining the object of some emotion, desire, or judgment is not sufficient for meaningfulness, on this view. Instead, there are certain conditions of the material world that could confer meaning on anyone’s life, not merely because they are viewed as meaningful, wanted for their own sake, or believed to be choiceworthy, but instead (at least partially) because they are inherently worthwhile or valuable in themselves.

Morality (the good), enquiry (the true), and creativity (the beautiful) are widely held instances of activities that confer meaning on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow––along with the counterexamples to subjectivism above––are not. Objectivism is widely thought to be a powerful general explanation of these particular judgments: the former are meaningful not merely because some agent (whether it is an individual, her society, or even God) cares about them or judges them to be worth doing, while the latter simply lack significance and cannot obtain it even if some agent does care about them or judge them to be worth doing. From an objective perspective, it is possible for an individual to care about the wrong thing or to be mistaken that something is worthwhile, and not merely because of something she cares about all the more or judges to be still more choiceworthy. Of course, meta-ethical debates about the existence and nature of value are again relevant to appraising this rationale.

Some objectivists think that being the object of a person’s mental states plays no constitutive role in making that person’s life meaningful, although they of course contend that it often plays an instrumental role––liking a certain activity, after all, is likely to motivate one to do it. Relatively few objectivists are “pure” in that way, although consequentialists do stand out as clear instances (e.g., Singer 1995; Smuts 2018, 75–99). Most objectivists instead try to account for the above intuitions driving subjectivism by holding that a life is more meaningful, not merely because of objective factors, but also in part because of propositional attitudes such as cognition, conation, and emotion. Particularly influential has been Susan Wolf’s hybrid view, captured by this pithy slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2015, 112; see also Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Raz 2001, 10–40; Mintoff 2008; Wolf 2010, 2016; Fischer 2019, 9–23; Belshaw 2021, 160–81). This theory implies that no meaning accrues to one’s life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or cares about a project that is not truly worthwhile, or if one takes up a truly worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be satisfied by it, or care about it. A related approach is that, while subjective attraction is not necessary for meaning, it could enhance it (e.g., Audi 2005, 344; Metz 2013, 183–84, 196–98, 220–25). For instance, a stereotypical Mother Teresa who is bored by and alienated from her substantial charity work might have a somewhat significant existence because of it, even if she would have an even more significant existence if she felt pride in it or identified with it.

There have been several attempts to capture theoretically what all objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning in a person’s life. Over the past few decades, one encounters the proposals that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that involve: positively connecting with organic unity beyond oneself (Nozick 1981, 594–619); being creative (Taylor 1987; Matheson 2018); living an emotional life (Solomon 1993; cf. Williams 2020, 56–78); promoting good consequences, such as improving the quality of life of oneself and others (Singer 1995; Audi 2005; Smuts 2018, 75–99); exercising or fostering rational nature in exceptional ways (Smith 1997, 179–221; Gewirth 1998, 177–82; Metz 2013, 222–36); progressing toward ends that can never be fully realized because one’s knowledge of them changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope (Mintoff 2008); living virtuously (May 2015, 61–138; McPherson 2020); and loving what is worth loving (Wolf 2016). There is as yet no convergence in the field on one, or even a small cluster, of these accounts.

One feature of a large majority of the above naturalist theories is that they are aggregative or additive, objectionably treating a life as a mere “container” of bits of life that are meaningful considered in isolation from other bits (Brännmark 2003, 330). It has become increasingly common for philosophers of life’s meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts.

For instance, a life that has lots of beneficence and otherwise intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely repetitive (à la the movie Groundhog Day ) is less than maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987; Blumenfeld 2009). Furthermore, a life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial amount of meaningful (or otherwise desirable) parts seems to have more meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful (desirable) parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2013, 18–22; Dorsey 2015). Still more, a life in which its meaningless (or otherwise undesirable parts) cause its meaningful (desirable) parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems meaningful in virtue of this redemptive pattern, “good life-story,” or narrative self-expression (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Wong 2008; Fischer 2009, 145–77; Kauppinen 2012; May 2015, 61–138; Velleman 2015, 141–73). These three cases suggest that meaning can inhere in life as a whole, that is, in the relationships between its parts, and not merely in the parts considered in isolation. However, some would maintain that it is, strictly speaking, the story that is or could be told of a life that matters, not so much the life-story qua relations between events themselves (de Bres 2018).

There are pure or extreme versions of holism present in the literature, according to which the only possible bearer of meaning in life is a person’s life as a whole, and not any isolated activities, relationships, or states (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). A salient argument for this position is that judgments of the meaningfulness of a part of someone’s life are merely provisional, open to revision upon considering how they fit into a wider perspective. So, for example, it would initially appear that taking an ax away from a madman and thereby protecting innocent parties confers some meaning on one’s life, but one might well revise that judgment upon learning that the intention behind it was merely to steal an ax, not to save lives, or that the madman then took out a machine gun, causing much more harm than his ax would have. It is worth considering how far this sort of case is generalizable, and, if it can be to a substantial extent, whether that provides strong evidence that only life as a whole can exhibit meaningfulness.

Perhaps most objectivists would, at least upon reflection, accept that both the parts of a life and the whole-life relationships among the parts can exhibit meaning. Supposing there are two bearers of meaning in a life, important questions arise. One is whether a certain narrative can be meaningful even if its parts are not, while a second is whether the meaningfulness of a part increases if it is an aspect of a meaningful whole (on which see Brännmark 2003), and a third is whether there is anything revealing to say about how to make tradeoffs between the parts and whole in cases where one must choose between them (Blumenfeld 2009 appears to assign lexical priority to the whole).

Naturalists until recently had been largely concerned to show that meaning in life is possible without God or a soul; they have not spent much time considering how such spiritual conditions might enhance meaning, but have, in moderate fashion, tended to leave that possibility open (an exception is Hooker 2008). Lately, however, an extreme form of naturalism has arisen, according to which our lives would probably, if not unavoidably, have less meaning in a world with God or a soul than in one without. Although such an approach was voiced early on by Baier (1957), it is really in the past decade or so that this “anti-theist” position has become widely and intricately discussed.

One rationale, mentioned above as an objection to the view that God’s purpose constitutes meaning in life, has also been deployed to argue that the existence of God as such would necessarily reduce meaning, that is, would consist of anti-matter. It is the idea that master/servant and parent/child analogies so prominent in the monotheist religious traditions reveal something about our status in a world where there is a qualitatively higher being who has created us with certain ends in mind: our independence or dignity as adult persons would be violated (e.g., Baier 1957/2000, 118–20; Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). One interesting objection to this reasoning has been to accept that God’s existence is necessarily incompatible with the sort of meaning that would come (roughly stated) from being one’s own boss, but to argue that God would also make greater sorts of meaning available, offering a net gain to us (Mawson 2016, 110–58).

Another salient argument for thinking that God would detract from meaning in life appeals to the value of privacy (Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 55–110). God’s omniscience would unavoidably make it impossible for us to control another person’s access to the most intimate details about ourselves, which, for some, amounts to a less meaningful life than one with such control. Beyond questioning the value of our privacy in relation to God, one thought-provoking criticism has been to suggest that, if a lack of privacy really would substantially reduce meaning in our lives, then God, qua morally perfect person, would simply avoid knowing everything about us (Tooley 2018). Lacking complete knowledge of our mental states would be compatible with describing God as “omniscient,” so the criticism goes, insofar as that is plausibly understood as having as much knowledge as is morally permissible.

Turn, now, to major arguments for thinking that having a soul would reduce life’s meaning, so that if one wants a maximally meaningful life, one should prefer a purely physical world, or at least one in which people are mortal. First and foremost, there has been the argument that an immortal life could not avoid becoming boring (Williams 1973), rendering life pointless according to many subjective and objective theories. The literature on this topic has become enormous, with the central reply being that immortality need not get boring (for more recent discussions, see Fischer 2009, 79–101, 2019, 117–42; Mawson 2019, 51–52; Williams 2020, 30–41, 123–29; Belshaw 2021, 182–97). However, it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is sufficient for meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a meaningful sacrifice to make. Being bored for an eternity would not be blissful or even satisfying, to be sure, but if it served the function of preventing others from being bored for an eternity, would it be meaningful (at least to some degree)? If, as is commonly held, sacrificing one’s life could be meaningful, why not also sacrificing one’s liveliness?

Another reason given to reject eternal life is that it would become repetitive, which would substantially drain it of meaning (Scarre 2007, 54–55; May 2009, 46–47, 64–65, 71; Smuts 2011, 142–44; cf. Blumenfeld 2009). If, as it appears, there are only a finite number of actions one could perform, relationships one could have, and states one could be in during an eternity, one would have to end up doing the same things again. Even though one’s activities might be more valuable than rolling a stone up a hill forever à la Sisyphus, the prospect of doing them over and over again forever is disheartening for many. To be sure, one might not remember having done them before and hence could avoid boredom, but for some philosophers that would make it all the worse, akin to having dementia and forgetting that one has told the same stories. Others, however, still find meaning in such a life (e.g., Belshaw 2021, 197, 205n41).

A third meaning-based argument against immortality invokes considerations of narrative. If the pattern of one’s life as a whole substantially matters, and if a proper pattern would include a beginning, a middle, and an end, it appears that a life that never ends would lack the relevant narrative structure. “Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form....With immortality, the novel never ends....How meaningful can such a novel be?” (May 2009, 68, 72; see also Scarre 2007, 58–60). Notice that this objection is distinct from considerations of boredom and repetition (which concern novelty ); even if one were stimulated and active, and even if one found a way not to repeat one’s life in the course of eternity, an immortal life would appear to lack shape. In reply, some reject the idea that a meaningful life must be akin to a novel, and intead opt for narrativity in the form of something like a string of short stories that build on each other (Fischer 2009, 145–77, 2019, 101–16). Others, though, have sought to show that eternity could still be novel-like, deeming the sort of ending that matters to be a function of what the content is and how it relates to the content that came before (e.g., Seachris 2011; Williams 2020, 112–19).

There have been additional objections to immortality as undercutting meaningfulness, but they are prima facie less powerful than the previous three in that, if sound, they arguably show that an eternal life would have a cost, but probably not one that would utterly occlude the prospect of meaning in it. For example, there have been the suggestions that eternal lives would lack a sense of preciousness and urgency (Nussbaum 1989, 339; Kass 2002, 266–67), could not exemplify virtues such as courageously risking one’s life for others (Kass 2002, 267–68; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94), and could not obtain meaning from sustaining or saving others’ lives (Nussbaum 1989, 338; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Note that at least the first two rationales turn substantially on the belief in immortality, not quite immortality itself: if one were immortal but forgot that one is or did not know that at all, then one could appreciate life and obtain much of the virtue of courage (and, conversely, if one were not immortal, but thought that one is, then, by the logic of these arguments, one would fail to appreciate limits and be unable to exemplify courage).

The previous two sections addressed theoretical accounts of what would confer meaning on a human person’s life. Although these theories do not imply that some people’s lives are in fact meaningful, that has been the presumption of a very large majority of those who have advanced them. Much of the procedure has been to suppose that many lives have had meaning in them and then to consider in virtue of what they have or otherwise could. However, there are nihilist (or pessimist) perspectives that question this supposition. According to nihilism (pessimism), what would make a life meaningful in principle cannot obtain for any of us.

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of extreme supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether a spiritual realm exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither is real, then you are committed to nihilism, to the denial that life can have any meaning. Athough this rationale for nihilism was prominent in the modern era (and was more or less Camus’ position), it has been on the wane in analytic philosophical circles, as extreme supernaturalism has been eclipsed by the moderate variety.

The most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to supernaturalism, or at least not explicitly. One cluster of ideas appeals to what meta-ethicists call “error theory,” the view that evaluative claims (in this case about meaning in life, or about morality qua necessary for meaning) characteristically posit objectively real or universally justified values, but that such values do not exist. According to one version, value judgments often analytically include a claim to objectivity but there is no reason to think that objective values exist, as they “would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe” (Mackie 1977/1990, 38). According to a second version, life would be meaningless if there were no set of moral standards that could be fully justified to all rational enquirers, but it so happens that such standards cannot exist for persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982, 12–17). According to a third, we hold certain beliefs about the objectivity and universality of morality and related values such as meaning because they were evolutionarily advantageous to our ancestors, not because they are true. Humans have been “deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a distinterested, objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey” (Ruse and Wilson 1986, 179; cf. Street 2015). One must draw on the intricate work in meta-ethics that has been underway for the past several decades in order to appraise these arguments.

In contrast to error-theoretic arguments for nihilism, there are rationales for it accepting that objective values exist but denying that our lives can ever exhibit or promote them so as to obtain meaning. One version of this approach maintains that, for our lives to matter, we must be in a position to add objective value to the world, which we are not since the objective value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value remains infinity. One way to question this argument, beyond doubting the value of space-time or stars, is to suggest that, even if one cannot add to the value of the universe, meaning plausibly comes from being the source of certain values.

A second rationale for nihilism that accepts the existence of objective value is David Benatar’s (2006, 18–59) intriguing “asymmetry argument” for anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would always be on balance bad for them. For Benatar, the bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, it follows that existing is always worse compared to not existing. Although this argument is illustrated with experiential goods and bads, it seems generalizable to non-experiential ones, including meaning in life and anti-matter. The literature on this argument has become large (for a recent collection, see Hauskeller and Hallich 2022).

Benatar (2006, 60–92, 2017, 35–63) has advanced an additional argument for nihilism, one that appeals to Thomas Nagel’s (1986, 208–32) widely discussed analysis of the extremely external standpoint that human persons can take on their lives. There exists, to use Henry Sidgwick’s influential phrase, the “point of view of the universe,” that is, the standpoint that considers a human being’s life in relation to all times and all places. When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one’s puny impact on the world, little of one’s life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society on Earth over 75 years or so just does not amount to much, when considering the billions of temporal years and billions of light-years that make up space-time. Although this reasoning grants limited kinds of meaning to human beings, from a personal, social, or human perspective, Benatar both denies that the greatest sort of meaning––a cosmic one––is available to them and contends that this makes their lives bad, hence the “nihilist” tag. Some have objected that our lives could in fact have a cosmic significance, say, if they played a role in God’s plan (Quinn 2000, 65–66; Swinburne 2016, 154), were the sole ones with a dignity in the universe (Kahane 2014), or engaged in valuable activities that could be appreciated by anyone anywhere anytime (Wolf 2016, 261–62). Others naturally maintain that cosmic significance is irrelevant to appraising a human life, with some denying that it would be a genuine source of meaning (Landau 2017, 93–99), and others accepting that it would be but maintaining that the absence of this good would not count as a bad or merit regret (discussed in Benatar 2017, 56–62; Williams 2020, 108–11).

Finally, a distinguishable source of nihilism concerns the ontological, as distinct from axiological, preconditions for meaning in life. Perhaps most radically, there are those who deny that we have selves. Do we indeed lack selves, and, if we do, is a meaningful life impossible for us (see essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018; Le Bihan 2019)? Somewhat less radically, there are those who grant that we have selves, but deny that they are in charge in the relevant way. That is, some have argued that we lack self-governance or free will of the sort that is essential for meaning in life, at least if determinism is true (Pisciotta 2013; essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018). Non-quantum events, including human decisions, appear to be necessited by a prior state of the world, such that none could have been otherwise, and many of our decisions are a product of unconscious neurological mechanisms (while quantum events are of course utterly beyond our control). If none of our conscious choices could have been avoided and all were ultimately necessited by something external to them, perhaps they are insufficient to merit pride or admiration or to constitute narrative authorship of a life. In reply, some maintain that a compatibilism between determinism and moral responsibility applies with comparable force to meaning in life (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77), while others contend that incompatibilism is true of moral responsibility but not of meaning (Pereboom 2014).

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Delon, N., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life ”, a bibliography on PhilPapers.
Metz, T., 2021, “ Life, Meaning of ”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , E. Mason (ed.).
O’Brien, W., 2021, “ The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).
Seachris, J., 2021, “ Meaning of Life: The Analytic Perspective ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.).

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