Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species…. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

He who knows not what the Universe is knows not what is his place therein. He who knows not for what end it was created, knows not himself and knows not the world. He who is deficient in either of these parts of knowledge cannot even say for what end he himself was created.

 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (VIII,52)

How many brave individual actions are buried in the crowd of a battle? 

Michel de Montaigne

Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

The only remedy, the only rule, and the sole doctrine for avoiding the evils by which mankind is surrounded, whatever they are, is to resolve to bear them so far as our nature permits, or to put an end to them courageously and promptly.

 Michel de Montaigne

It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck on top of it, bivouacked above the tree line, free, but freezing, with no way forward.

Tim Parks, The New Yorker (Reverend)

Life should be a fight to the death.

Tarquin Hall, The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life.  We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

He did not think he was fleeing from anything behind him, nor, most importantly, towards anything in front of him; in other words he fully accepted the paradox implied in the conclusion that his movements had direction but no aim.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

He had to ignore the itch, the desire to intervene, for the purpose and significance of action were being corroded away by its thoroughgoing lack of significance.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

Sir, it is driving on the system of life.

Samuel Johnson commenting (1781) on why we continue to try, as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson