c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.
— Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear
Finding meaning in the moment is what gives those meanings a value worth remembering.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
What does it mean to be healthy? Heal Thy.
— J.R. Rim
I am not here to be average, I am not here to be great, I am not here to be successful, and I am not here to be happy, I am here to simply be all of me.
— Ray Mancini, Zen, Meditation & the Art of Shooting: Performance Edge - Sports Edition
I opened up a dictionaryAnd tried to find a meaning in a hurry.Turned the pages to look for the word -- "Perfect"And saw you listed there, coz I know you're worth it!
— Ritika Chhabra, A Dark Love
Sometimes I just say that to read one thing more than twice is just a losing of time, but some stuff are used a lot of times, are read a lot of times until the meaning is get...
— Deyth Banger
. . . for a moment, perhaps an hour, they would wait, wait for something, and when that waiting was over, it was simply dismissed, goodbyes stated, reading materials closed, a momentary pause in the day that did not hold up to whatever came next.Waiting was often a resented gift, imparted to those who accepted it grudgingly in the hopes that something better would come along when the gift was tossed aside, boxed away for the next recipient.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
And the shower of roses spun around me, inviting me to take part in their ever-present waltz.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
There should be a purpose and meaning given to life.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
But I am not those people. I am just the biologist
—  I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.
Everything happening to you now is a signal or symbol and has meaning. Your opportunity is to recognize the meaning and utilize it in your life.
— Russell Anthony Gibbs, The Six Principles of Enlightenment and Meaning of Life
Stephen King is a powerful guy, will powerful vocabulary.
— Deyth Banger
Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence
— Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
What's the meaning of ignore? You hear somebody, but you never asnwer to him!
— Deyth Banger
There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
What you give meaning to is what causes your emotion. Before you react know why you are giving something so much energy or fear. When you begin to understand why you give things meaning you can begin to change how you react and why you do what you do.
— Shannon L. Alder
What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.
— Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Delay of pain: that was the meaning of life, wasn’t it?“I’ve made some bad decisions,” Caine said, not really meaning to say it out loud.
— Michael  Grant, Light
The writer provides the text; the reader, the meaning.
— Marty Rubin
And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who in­ vented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
It is not a case of finding the meaning for the moments, but giving the moments meaning.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
Capture the essence of your aspirations by understand the true meaning of your intuitive thoughts.
— Steven Redhead, Unleash The Power of Your Heart and Mind
Science is about our passionate conviction that we are placed within a universe that is not simply the result of our imaginings, and our longing and determination to understand it. Ultimately, science is about reality, truth and freedom.
— David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress
The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.
— Niall Williams, Only Say the Word
It is the things that happen, then how you react to them , that gives life some meaning.
— Steven Redhead, Unleash The Power of Your Heart and Mind
That is the beauty of reading a meaningful quote. Just as it is with the spirit of our hearts, sometimes we must feed the doves in order to hear them sing.
— Jason Versey
And it's only symbolism puts magic and meaning into anything. You of all people should know that. We can make love amongst the gods, or we can screw on a dirty mattress. It's our choice.
— Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 2
The meaning of everything is the meaning you give it, and your experiences are what you say they are.
— David Cameron Gikandi, A Happy Pocket Full of Money: Infinite Wealth and Abundance in the Here and Now
There isn't meaning if we give everything in replace for nothing!
— Deyth Banger
Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.
— Clive Barker, Galilee
I know my life's meaningful because" - and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued - " because I'm a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Someone. Everyone. Anyone. No-one. One. One can't be everyone, but there isn't more than one everyone, at the same time. And at the same time no-one can't be someone, but anyone can be one, and also anyone can be a no-one. To sum up - everyone is someone, and any-one becomes a no-one if you divide the one part long enough by every part of every-one, so in conclusion, I have no idea what I’m talking about, basically.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?
— A.M. Homes
People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so
— Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonored; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
— Jean Baudrillard
The commendable thing about life is that it is always one step ahead of you, no matter how much you do or how little. So you can only expect that if you give your best, life will only give/be better.P.S – To say that attitude matters is trivial. To know that attitude matters is mandatory.
— Preeti Bhonsle
I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love... too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Science provides us with the methods we need to discover the truth. However it is only by developing wisdom through spirituality that provides the force we need to generate meaning in our lives.
— Ray Mancini, Zen, Meditation & the Art of Shooting: Performance Edge - Sports Edition
That old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Translating from #cat is easy - you just ignore everything, then you decide what you want it to have said, thought, or wanted.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.
— Tariq Ramadan, The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism
What is the meaning of it all, of this...of this world?'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, 'mercy', but I wasn't certain of either.
— Orhan Pamuk
Purpose is the vision for your existence.
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
After all, a man's life, when all is said and done, should serve some greater purpose than that of a hero in a cautionary tale.
— Judd Trichter, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
What is the most important thing in your life?For me, it is my freedom of mind, my freedom to choose my own ways of self-construction or self-destruction.
— Preeti Bhonsle, 27 Broken Footprints
You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.
— Joseph Campbell, An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms
One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old... and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening.
— Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.
— Viktor E. Frankl
We love to learn because learning feels good. It both satisfies and stimulates curiosity. Reading a good book, having a meaningful conversation, listening to great music—just doing these things make us happy. They have no extrinsic purpose. To give them one takes away from their joy.
— Zander Sherman, The Curiosity of School: Education and the Dark Side of Enlightenment
Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day. C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit.
— Gündüz Vassaf, Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life
Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, I'd feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when I'm deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didn't accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time we're sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning.
— Colin Wilson
When did the world begin and how?"I asked a lamb, a goat, a cow:"What's it all about and why?"I asked a hog as he went by:"Where will the whole thing end, and when?"I asked a duck, a goose, a hen:And I copied all the answers too,A quack, a honk, an oink, a moo.
— Robert Clairmont
The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.
— Laurens van der Post
But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.
— John Logan, Red
Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.
— Iain M. Banks, Transition
A unique human trait is that we try to find meaning in the things that happen to us.
— Jason Haxton
Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her
—  it was so different that it was not even the same event.
Balance is only meaningful when we choose Love as the center of gravity!
— Phil 'Philosofree' Cheney
Uh, I really didn't mean to disturb you.''I sincerely hope that is untrue. If you arrived here with no objective capable of disturbing me then you arrived with no objective at all, and you will have succeeded in disturbing me without purpose.
— Jonathan Renshaw, Dawn of Wonder
And our desire to knowEach other and desertEach other for newCenters of meaning so thatThe boundaries may reignAnd in doing so be undone.
— Rob Schlegel
Look at your life like a blank canvas and you're the artist, now go ahead and paint your masterpiece." Ray Mancini.
— Ray Mancini
All the higher values in life get redefined on a regular basis for good
—  there is no static meaning as such.
To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal ... because in striving for your goal there are many things you do not see, which are directly in front of your eyes.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.
— Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness
I am who I am.A coincidence no less unthinkablethan any other.I could have had differentancestors, after all.I could have flutteredfrom another nestor crawled bescaledfrom under another tree.Nature's wardrobeholds a fair supply of costumes:spider, seagull, field mouse.Each fits perfectly right offand is dutifully worninto shreds.
— Wisława Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog
The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality
—  all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.
When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.
— Federico Fellini, Fellini On Fellini
Protecting your treasure means to give your life for it.
— J.R. Rim
In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Babynology.com explores baby names of all origins
—  you can get plenty of baby names along with meaning and origin. You can even search the meanings of your baby names.
We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.
— Mark Epstein
(Dune's Frank) Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change.
— Joseph Bottum
A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.
— Jules Cashford
Time is measured in meaning
— Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
. . . for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
To be young and to experience the feeling of being alive is a sweet feeling. To feel alive and to have a purpose and a goal to that life is better still.
— James Rozoff, Stories Light And Dark: Ten Short Stories
Often in life those seemingly ordinary moments hold the most extraordinary meaning.
— Ken Poirot
Practice appreciation for who you are and what you have… and allow your life to unfold in the most amazing way.
— Millen Livis
Some words were made up without any thought given. Nice is one of them. Nice has no meaning. Nice gets thrown out there to replace something meaningful. Take Goodreads and turn it into Nicereads. This goes to show that nice provides no justice.
— J.R. Rim, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.
— Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd
When people view their lives as insignificant, they escape using pleasure.
— Moxie Will
Nothing is more futile than looking for meaning in things that have none.
— Marty Rubin
Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.
— Andrea Seigel, To Feel Stuff
What does it mean to be me? I don't know. Maybe that's just it. Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe all I am is emptiness, is nothing.
— Katherine Ewell, Dear Killer
We must strive to become more daily. We must honestly assess our weaknesses and overcome them. We must work toward the highest possible version of ourselves. This is a worthy use of our time, but it is only when we do so with the ultimate aim of service to our fellow man that we really connect with something greater than ourselves. To contribute to the world in a positive way, this is the gift of life.
— Chris Matakas, My Mastery: Continued Education Through Jiu Jitsu
The beautiful truth about service is that we are afforded countless opportunities to be its vehicle. Every interaction with another is an opportunity to serve. From simply letting someone into your lane in traffic, to holding a door, to a kind smile. This is all service. I am humbled by this simple truth. We are given the opportunity to express the most meaningful use of our lives every time we interact with another sentient being.
— Chris Matakas, My Mastery: Continued Education Through Jiu Jitsu
The key to living a purposeful life lies in identifying how best you can be a vehicle for God's divine love and light.
— Rebecca Rosen, Awaken the Spirit Within: 10 Steps to Ignite Your Life and Fulfill Your Divine Purpose
While we all share God's powerful DNA, we're also individual expressions of God. Meaning, there's no one else quite like you. So set the intention now to become clear on exactly what strengths and talents make you unique. When you know who and what you are, you reclaim your power and you feel empowered to move forward with clarity, confidence, and conviction, along with a joyful sense of divine purpose.
— Rebecca Rosen, Awaken the Spirit Within: 10 Steps to Ignite Your Life and Fulfill Your Divine Purpose
It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.
— Tom McNeal, Far Far Away
Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.
— Marilynne Robinson
No man voluntarily expresses his opinion without some intent to make a difference, and even if he does, he shouldn't.
— Criss Jami, Healology
A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality.
— Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, Filsafat dan Praktik Pendidikan Islam Syed M. Naquib Al-Attas
Each drop that fell,had a story to tell.each smile that curved,said a million words.(Poem: Our Existence, Book: Ginger and Honey)
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber, Ginger and Honey
No, no. Not a genius. This is like what reading is like for you. You look at the squiggles and loops, and the puzzle opens until suddenly nothing means something, something more than the sum of the parts, right? I see one hunk of metal and then another, and the puzzle opens. They turn in my mind and just make sense. Together they all mean something.
— Jonathan Friesen, Both of Me
We are born, we grow up, we live our lives as best we can. If we are thoughtful we are good parents and good partners. If we are wise we strive for integrity and intimacy. If we are fortunate we discover love and joy. If we are able, we make the world a little better than we found it. That is all there is for any of us.
— Robert B. Reich
To drown in treacle is just as unpleasant as to drown in mud.People today are in danger of drowning in information; but because they have been taught information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.The lightning said to the oak tree: 'Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!
— Idries Shah, Reflections
One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!
— Michael Flynn
The glory of victory softens our view of past frailties.
— Marian Deegan, Relevance: Matter More
When you move something, you discover new meanings in it, Kristina thought, watching them.
— Molly Gloss
The truth is that our enjoyments and our evaluations, like our trades, are learned; intensive knowledge, as well as extensive, is acquired. We learn how to value possessions as well as how to make them; our passions, our disgusts, and our ambitions are learned. Just as we have evolved ways of transmuting physical elements from one to another, so we have evolved ways of transmuting experience into meaning.
— Denham Sutcliffe
Love had to be deeper than that, than a glance over tea, which was indicative but not dispositive.
— Michael  Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly
I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.
— Dean Koontz
I have spent so many nights out under the starsEuphoria running through my veins and alcohol coursing through my bloodMy mind would race along with my heartMy vision drawn to the stars and all the possibilities of what is out thereSuddenly the world and all its problems seems so infinitesimal My mind leaves this plane And a smile is drawn across my faceI know this isn’t reality, but I absorb it with all my beingI find it better to be lost out here then found in my real lifeAmongst the stars now I can live And it’s beautiful For the moments it lasts, it’s beautifulIts heaven on earth
— Morris R. Gates
If nothing lasts then everything has meaning. If everything dies that means we actually live.
— Chris Matakas
At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences
— Piero Scaruffi
Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?
— Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Reason begets honesty, and honesty, if given its head, begets confidence; so consequently, there is a sort of grand authority in the stances of those who know why they are standing.
— Criss Jami, Healology
You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated."Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature."Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that somehow takes account of us. I don't believe that modern man is a stranded fragment of life in an empty universe. I've an instinct that tells me that there's a purpose, and that I can understand that purpose more deeply by trusting my instinct. I can't believe the world is meaningless. I don't expect life to explode in my face at any moment. When I walk back to my cottage, I don't feel like a meaningless fragment of life walking over a lot of dead hills. I feel a part of the landscape, as if it's somehow aware of me, and friendly.
— Colin Wilson, The Glass Cage
Were all trying to find meaning to make sense of our realities; in search of happiness within, Without realising our happiness within; is the only reality that gives life a meaning.
— Nikki Rowe
As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie... I want it to be about the most horrible, treacherous aliens ever known to man who are about to destroy life as we know it, leading to the most spectacular thrill ride of an adventure with fantastic space battles and huge explosions and great special effects -- a white knuckle ride for the movie audience. Yeah, but what’s it about?I can write space battles with the best of them, but what makes that space battle interesting to me is: why are they fighting? What are the stakes? What does the hero lose if he loses? And what does he win if he wins? Why should we care? I'm talking about the second level of story-telling. The level that examines what's going on inside the characters — their moral and ethical dilemmas, their doubts, fears, inner conflicts, how they change as the story progresses. These are the things that make us, as members of an audience, get emotionally involved.
— Michael Piller, Fade In: The Writing of Star Trek: Insurrection
And when you die only your thoughts that have reached paper remain. Finally when someone stumbles upon those words, reads about your loves and your losses, you touch them emotionally and for a time they finally feel understood. For that time they realise, they too shared the same thoughts and ideas,And then they realise just as I have realised, You are not truly as alone in this universe as you think are.
— - Morris R. Gates
I'm left with the pages of my life just turning,The story being filled slowly day by day,But the end is approaching and it is out of my hands, Hopefully I will reach my climax,Hopefully I will be able to draw my conclusions,Until then …All I can do is just turn the page
— Morris R. Gates
Let's live our lives with great meaning and purpose in the attempt to influence the world to whatever degree our circumstance allows.
— Chris Matakas, My Mastery: Learning to Live through Jiu Jitsu
...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
— Viktor E. Frankl
A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful.
— Criss Jami, Healology
You were almost like a haiku: said so little, but meant so much.
— Abraham Algahanem
But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.
— David Cronenberg, Consumed
We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.
— David Cronenberg, Consumed
Putting it into words will destroy any meaning.
— Haruki Murakami
Life is not a matter for simple optimism--for there is evil
—  nor for mere pessimism--for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.
God is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of God. Music is a language more profound than words. How often have you heard a great piece of music and felt that? Great music does not just make you feel good; great music suggests some profound truth or mysterious meaning that is objectively true but not translatable into words.
— Peter Kreeft
Work is easy when it’s full of meaning and shared with others.
— Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully: How a Curious Traveler Met the Pope, Walked on Coals, Danced with Rabbis, and Revived His Prayer Life
Man’s desire is to know the mind of God.
— Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully: How a Curious Traveler Met the Pope, Walked on Coals, Danced with Rabbis, and Revived His Prayer Life
God is the inevitability of humanity’s search for true meaning.
— Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully: How a Curious Traveler Met the Pope, Walked on Coals, Danced with Rabbis, and Revived His Prayer Life
...WHAT DID YOU DO TODAY...that counts?...that carries meaning?...that made the day worthwhile?...what will you do tomorrow?
— Richard House, The Kills
Ignorance is sacred and im an atheist.
— Xristos Grigore
He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
— Ian McEwan
God made you for a reason and your life has profound meaning! We discover that meaning and purpose only when we make God the reference point of our lives.
— Rick Warren
Love.. Can me mean things..
— TheKatAttack
Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one's midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone. This comforting illusion may be shattered by some urgent irreversible experience ... None more potently confronts us with finiteness and contingency than the imminence of our own death.
— Irvin D. Yalom
My husband said to me while I was swooning in his arms, 'Why are all the longest dances the draggiest?'I took this to mean that he has not loved me for a very long time. Everything means something, or it does not. I have expressed an opinion. Every effect has a source that is not unfamiliar. It's all so evil.("The Uncanny")
— Diane Williams
There is no science without spirituality
—  spirituality has no meaning without science.
If you're not grateful for what you already have, why should you be blessed with more...
— Germany Kent
Write as if life has no meanings without writing.
— Debasish Mridha
The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sometimes we exist long enough to lead the next generation; other times, only to plant a seed and let its resonations of our time here on Earth ripple into new waves.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Your life is not a countdown to your death, but a stepping stone for the lives that will live after you. Squander today, and you will find yourself useless tomorrow.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Life is what you make it and legacy is what you leave it. Stop trying to be perfect, stop waiting for perfection to find you, and start making your environment a product of you instead of the other way around.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
The world is changeable, and its ability to change is so fragile that a single person can be responsible for it.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Free will, determinism, meaning, existence, etc. are academic problems, not problems in life.
— Marty Rubin
We are but cells living in a much larger organism, however, this does not make our existence less significant – for an organism without cells is no organism at all. We define it; we make it what it is. We are responsible for its health, its functionality, and above all, its purpose. A lone cell can restore the others, or a lone cell can spread a plague.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Leaving the familiar for unknown terrain is like a death - and feeling this level of finality should snap one back to life for life has greater meaning in the face of death.
— Donna Lynn Hope
What's the use in prolonging life if you don't do anything with it?
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
In modern society the term "no" have changed meaning. It now seems to be an abbreviation for "Negotiations Open".
— Jury Nel
When we go online, we commit ourselves to the care of online mechanisms. Digital Band-Aids for digital wounds. We feed ourselves into machines, hoping some algorithm will digest the mess that is our experience into something legible, something more meaningful than the "bag of associations" we fear we are.
— Michael  Harris
Jan Hindman knows all too well that people who have lied for decades about their offending would lie to her about being victimized as a child, so she compared the reports of abuse by child molesters who were not being polygraphed on their answers with a later group who was informed that they would have to take a polygraph after the interview. The group that was being polygraphed was also given immunity from prosecution for crimes previously unknown in order to take away one of the many reasons that offenders lie
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
A part of me genuinely wanted to be the worst because I was so sick of everyone fighting to be the best.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
— Corrie ten Boom
Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé.
— Tim Minchin
This is the greatest mystery of the human mind--the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.
— John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday
Apology is not about saying I'm sorry, but it is about the meaning you put behind the apology and admitting that you are the wrong part.
— Unarine Ramaru
No, no, it's not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until you're sixty-five.
— Morrie Schwartz
So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
We don't experience our professional and personal lives as separate worlds
—  they are intertwined and holistic.
The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.
— Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Religion of the Future
In the absence of a story or foundation that gives hope or meaning, life has become a never-ending quest for pleasure and experience. Instead of being good, people want to feel good.
— Mark Sayers, The Vertical Self: How Biblical Faith Can Help Us Discover Who We Are in An Age of Self Obsession
[T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It.
— Joseph Campbell
The only truths worth arguing about are those truths that could prevent or lead to circumstances that may bite us in the rear sooner or later.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Unless individuals have the power to defy commoditization and define their own lives, their potential is vulnerable to the crushing forces of objectification.
— Tom Hayes
When someone asks me what a song is about, it’s like, I feel like I might ruin it if you ask me that. I feel like I did my best to explain the song in the song on its own terms as a song.
— Kyle Morton
All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.
— Sigmund Freud
Exercising a spiritual gift without showing true love is meaningless.
— Jim George
There is a meaning of life but I've been sworn to secrecy.
— Brian Spellman, Cartoonist's Book Camp
Ultimate meaning is meaningless. Meaning meaning means everything else.
— Brian Spellman, Cartoonist's Book Camp
Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. So why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things our eulogy will never cover?
— Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder
As humans we need each other to give meaning to the word happy!
— Unarine Ramaru