“Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?”
Fyodor Dostoevsky in “Notes from the Underground”
Dostoevsky was a great existential writer. When I read this quote I think of how humans have an intrinsic drive for intellectual expression and communication with others. The “pouring of water through a sieve” portion of the quote seems to relate to the transient nature of words, the impermanence of speech and the limitations in language.