Words to live by?

The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well.

Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die. Do not try to “find yourself”, you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and then live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and your actions slip easily into any mold, other than that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, “This is who I make myself”. Do not give in to hope.

Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which you imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake.

When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, “Fuck You!”. Remember, that to fight meaninglessness is futile but fight anyway, despite its futility.

The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own.

Live deliberately.

You are free.

- Anon

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Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

- Samuel Ullman