Robert Pantano > Quotes

“I am caught in the paradox of wanting to not want, desiring not to desire, trying to not try, knowing to unknow.”
― Robert Pantano

“Every good book I’ve read. Every good movie I’ve watched. Every good piece of comedy. Every beautiful art piece. All threw me into the conversations I needed to have but could never have with anyone directly.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“Pessimism counterbalances the ridiculously optimistic expectations of the culture we live in and helps us adapt out of the deeply detached, unrealistic perspective that we likely formed as a young child. It reminds us that things won’t always go our way or always be that nice, but rather, things will go wrong a lot, and that, despite this, we can still be ok. Paradoxically, we must recognize that through a certain quality of pessimism, we can better assist a more reasonably optimistic experience of life. We are all struggling and improvising our way through this strange existence, constantly confused and unsure. No one is perfect or normal in any traditional sense. We all make mistakes big and small. No one knows who or why they are. Happiness is hard and unclear. There is greed, tragedy, and malevolence in this world that we have and will continue to experience. And at any moment, this whole world and all of humanity could end for any number of reasons. Yet despite everything that was just said prior, the thought of it all ending should and does make us sad and tremble with fear. We don’t want it to end. In spite of the chaos, uncertainties, and hardships, we want to go on. We want to endure. We want to see what we can do, overcome, and experience in the face of it all. In this, we find the hopeful spirit and strength of humankind. We find optimism in pessimism.”
― Robert Pantano

“We are just as wise as the gods we created and just as clueless as the insects we smack down from our walls. We are just as insignificant as the dirt we walk on and just as marvelous as the cosmic nebulas that float above us. We are part of the whole of nature, cluelessly embedded in everything.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“We seem to so desire certainty. An immortality. A utopic end to conflict, suffering, and misunderstanding. And yet, in the final elimination of all darkness exists light with no contrast. And where there is no contrast of light, there is no perception of light at all.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“We are and have always been impossible victims to ourselves. Not merely to each other, but our own self.”
― Robert Pantano

“Michel de Montaigne wrote, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“If you were to experience something, but couldn’t understand or express the experience with words, then, of course, you wouldn’t be able to accurately describe the experience to other people. Thus, no one else would ever be able to know what you experienced. If this were true though, would that also mean that neither could you? Ludwig Wittgenstein was a 20th century, Austrian-British philosopher known for his uniquely innovative and often confusing ideas regarding the nature of language, internal experience, and the relationship between them. To help illustrate this relationship, Wittgenstein proposed the following metaphorical thought experiment in his primary later book, Philosophical Investigations, in which, he suggested that we imagine a group of people. Each person has a box. Inside each box, there is a thing that everyone calls a beetle. However, in the context of this thought experiment, no one is allowed to look inside anyone else’s box. Everyone can look inside their own and they are only allowed to talk about what’s in their box. So, the question is, can anyone ever know if anyone else actually has a beetle in their box? And can anyone know what anyone else’s beetle actually looks like, if they do? Sure, everyone can describe what’s in their’s, but they can, of course, only talk using words that everyone shares and understands regarding what’s in their box, which in this case is beetle. According to Wittgenstein, though, the thing inside the box cannot be meaningfully talked about using the word beetle because no one can ever confirm what anyone means by “beetle”. As a result, the word beetle can only mean the thing that’s in the box, but doesn’t and can’t necessarily describe the thing that’s actually in anyone’s box.”
― Robert Pantano

“Time is the most valuable thing. That’s what people say. This seems undisputable on the surface, I suppose; but fundamentally, I don’t know if time is inherently any more valuable than anything else. With no one to spend it, time means nothing.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“At bottom, I’m the only person who has ever decided if I wasted a day or not.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“It would seem as though the bulk of life is spent trying to avoid life. We hide our lives from each other. From ourselves. We avoid facing the bleakness and sadness.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“What we think we want is rarely what we do. If we ever got what we did, we would no longer have anything. What we really want is to want. To have something to ceaselessly chase and move towards. To feel the motion and synchronicity with the universe’s unending forward movement.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“In truth, no matter what we think we know, we are probably wrong, and no matter what anyone else thinks they know, they are probably wrong. No one knows what’s going on in any fundamental sense.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“We live in a culture that makes idealism its goal and a world that makes idealism impossible.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“The focus of AMOR FATI offers a much gentler and more passive sentiment. However, AMOR FATI need not deny the notion of trying to overcome and accomplish, of trying to thrash and swim against the current of existence and achieve things within it or control where it takes us. Rather one’s fate includes this. It includes trying to overcome life’s conditions and failing in some ultimate sense. And arguably this idea of AMOR FATI was in its own right an overcoming of Nietzsche’s, as well as potentially for those who adopt it. An overcoming of this ultimate conclusion of self-overcoming the unattainable ideal self and ideal life, AMOR FATI is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to live a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it and to still stare back at it and say: YES, I LOVE IT!!! What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten. And perhaps because of that Nietzsche remains arguably one of the most notable and dynamic philosophers of all time.”
― Robert Pantano

“In the dirt of life, it is up to us to plant the seeds, watch the flowers grow, and enjoy their beauty, even in spite of the fact that we know that they will die.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“Anxiety and boredom fought in his head, smashing up against the cage of his skull.”
― Robert Pantano, Millions of Little Threads

“In other words, the experience and effects of concrete knowledge can be fleeting, but the wonder found in the spirit of the unknown can be constant and enduring.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“If one enjoys or values the time they wasted, did they really waste it?”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“It’s like we create the need for things we don’t even need, just to eventually lose them.”
― Robert Pantano, Millions of Little Threads

“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness,” wrote Blaise Pascal.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“We are all condemned to inherit some portion of the malignant chains of our ancestors. We do not know any better until we do. And then the work begins.”
― Robert Pantano

“As if to say, I’d love to marvel at and enjoy this work of art I’ve created, the universe gave itself humanity. “Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence,” said twentieth-century American-British philosopher Alan Watts. What a shame it would be to waste this experience by failing to appreciate the glory and magnificence found in the unknown.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“What does it mean to live well and be virtuous in a world of suffering, chaos, and deterioration?”
― Robert Pantano

“Language and thought are but absurd abstractions of an already absurd and abstract reality.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“He was caught in a horrible paradigm in which the problem was also the solution, and the solution was also the problem.”
― Robert Pantano, Millions of Little Threads

“In truth, no matter what we think we know, we are probably wrong, and no matter what anyone else thinks they know, they are probably wrong. No one knows what’s going on in any fundamental sense. Nothing about this life is simple or clear, and from the perspective of the stars, nothing down here on earth—including us—matters all that much to anything beyond itself.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

“I think the appeal of getting drunk is that it’s like being dead. And we all want to be dead without having to die.”
― Robert Pantano, Notes from the End of Everything

“Stories help us see and understand various micro-moments and aspects of life. They help us better connect and share ideas, lessons, and meaning. They are a beautiful, essential device of conscious life. And stories don’t always have to be real or accurately representative of life, to be helpful and important. But the truth is we appear to so often see life the same way that our favorite stories do. It is no coincidence that most good stories share the same basic structure, ingredients, and shapes. They’re a reflection of how we often like to think, and how we often want the world to be. However, when we assume that our entire life can fit neatly into the template of our favorite stories, or the Hollywood films we are so often inclined to believe and try to model our life after, when we expect or pretend to always know what ultimately good or bad fortune is, we create an expectation in every decision, action, and event, that carries so much pressure we are likely to fear any decision at all.”
― Robert Pantano

“His sense of himself felt completely fragmented like part of who he was had been lost forever.”
― Robert Pantano, Millions of Little Threads