c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The meanings of life aren’t inherited. What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live. The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show. The beginning of the end of our order, our way, is now in view. This isn’t punishment, any more than dying is a punishment for being born.
— Stephen Jenkinson
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
— Stanley Kubrick
It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?
— Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life from Timeless Sages to Contemporary Gurus
What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
I want my life to mean something!
— Marliss Melton, In the Dark
Our once simple, unified meaning of life is being shattered into many, sometimes competing, concepts.
— M.., The Meaning(s) of Life: A Human's Guide to the Biology of Souls
If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most Ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.
— Ray Bradbury, Now and Forever
If my life had no meaning there was no reason not to end it.
— Dan Wells, Ruins
My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we really are: we are absurd, frivolous, we have bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look around ourselves, we don't know how to understand, we are all like this, all of us, you, and I, and everyone! And you aren't offended by my telling you straight to your faces that you are absurd? There is the basic stuff of life in your, isn't there? You know, I believe it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous. Yes, much better. People forgive each other more readily and become more humble, we can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection! To reach perfection there must first be much we do not understand. And if we understand too quickly we will probably not understand very well. I tell this to you who have been able to understand so much and - do not understand.'p. 577
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
I don't think it's a question of liking or disliking it," Tengo said..."It was the one thing he was best at." "Hmm. I see," Kumi said. She pondered this. "But that might very well be the best way to live your life.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Just say up on the hill is the meaning of life and someone knew it and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it. So they put a red vinyl sofa up there.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
1877. The vocation of humanity is to show forth the image of God and to be transformed into the image of the Father's only Son. This vocation takes a personal form since each of us is called to enter into the divine beatitude
—  it also concerns the human community as a whole.
...‘All this suffering,’ I said, ‘and nothing but greed and violence to build on when the war is over.’‘Have another soda-mint,’ said Charles.I had one. Then I said, ‘Why are we here? That’s what I don’t understand. Why be here at all when it all has to be so beastly?’‘I suppose we just came, like mould on cheese.’‘Then why do we want to be happy? Mould on cheese doesn’t want to be happy.’ ...
— Joyce Dennys, Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front 1942-1945
How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea of what the answer will be.
— Pam Houston
The point is, there is no point." Philip spoke up surprisingly. "No one here gets out alive. And over a sufficient period of time, all choices tend to normalize on a curve of random distribution.""You mean if you wait long enough, nothing happens?
— Rosemary Edghill, The Sword of Maiden's Tears
Life is not a hope, but it is all of this !!
— Hesham Nebr
Man is born in order to think (there he is, Kirill, finally!). Except that I don't believe that. I've never believed it, and I still don't believe it, and what man is born for -I have no idea. He's born, that's all. Scrapes by as best he can.
— Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
I live to enjoy life by the littlest things, feeling the grass between my toes, breathing fresh air, watching the wind sway the trees, enjoying the company of loved ones, a deep conversation, getting lost in a good book, going for a walk in nature, watching my kids grow up. Just the feeling itself of being alive, the absolute amazing fact that we are here right now, breathing, thinking, doing.
— Marigold Wellington
I thought that nothing enormously bad or good had happened to me during my life. All the normal things had occurred. I had lived a completely unremarkable life. I wanted only my home, and the love and safety of those around me, nothing else. I knew there was no particular reason why I was put on this earth, but here I was and I was glad to be here, awed by the beauty of it. It was a perfect moment. (p.99)
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain't. So, you can't worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang.
— Robert Coover, Huck Out West
The Myth of Sisyphus makes us wonder if we too are like the ones who are so distracted making friends with important people, staying on top of the latest technology, getting good marks in school, and making lots of money, that we never pause to think: What are we actually living for? Sisyphus ended up opening his heart to questions of meaning, value and purpose. He himself decided it was best to just make the most of his short time on earth, however meaningless it all may be. Through Sisyphus, Camus is telling us that life is a joke, and the courageous ones will accept that and have a laugh along the way. I know many movies released these days that operate under the same premise.
— Jon Morrison, Clear Minds & Dirty Feet: A Reason to Hope, a Message to Share
Life is less about finding and more about seeking.
— Seth Adam Smith, Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Most of us move through life with little chance to learn much about ourselves. We know some things we like and some things we dislike, we have a few ideas about what makes us happy, and we die in ignorance regarding anything profound within ourselves.
— Raymond E. Feist, The King's Buccaneer
The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives, past and present - and to come - forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time... An individual life is one thread in the tapestry, and what is one thread compared to the whole?
— Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Embrace your struggles. They are making you the person you were meant to be.
— Avijeet Das
Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn't feel meaningless.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
It's not about success and failure. It's not about good days and bad days. It's not about wealth or poverty. It's not about health or sickness. It's not even about life or death. It's about glorifying God in whatever circumstance you find yourself in.
— Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
Only the poor knew the meaning of life
—  the rich and the safe had to guess.
I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking ALL movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is THEIR lives are meaningless.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Life is the journey of coming home to ourselves.
— Lisa Cypers Kamen, Are We Happy Yet?: Eight Keys to Unlocking a Joyful Life
All life is a jest, Imhotep - and it is death who laughs last. Do you not hear it at every feast? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.
— Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End
Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adventure. That's all life is. But you got to trust that adventure.
— August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean
Life is life! The real meaning and definition of life is not wealth, though wealth can define and give meaning to life.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Treasures are hidden and hard to find but if we could find a real treasure, it will shine our lives. In the similar way ultimate reality is hidden and hard to find but if we could find it, it will shine our lives.
— Muditha Champika, Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
Of course, we need stories. There's a reason "42" is not a satisfying answer to life, the universe, and everything. Structure alone doesn't quench our existential thirst. We want meaning. And for our brains, meaning comes in the form of stories.
— Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything
A few years ago a practising Harley Street psychiatrist, who was dabbling in Buddhism, came to see me. I opened the conversation by saying 'At some time in his life, every intelligent man questions himself about the purpose of his existence.' Immediately, and with the most manifest disapproval, the psychiatrist replied 'Anybody who thinks such thoughts is mentally diseased.' Thus with a single gesture, he swept half-a-dozen major philosophers (some of whom have held chairs in universities—which guarantees their respectability if not their philosophy) into the lunatic asylum—the criminal lunatic asylum, to judge from his tone. I have never seen a man in such a funk.
— Nanavira Thera
As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. We strive to be ourselves. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t be firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal...In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he knows he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important.
— Hunter S. Thompson
You see, Adrian, we do many things. We assign meaning to some, and think of others as lacking it. But who's to tell when we're right - and when we're wrong?
— Mani S. Sivasubramanian, The Icedrop
We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora
Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!
— Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries
The purpose of life is life.
— Dejan Stojanovic
No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It's just one damn thing after another.
— Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
Masturbating the meaning of life since 1987. #lovewithmeneverdies
— Pat R, Os Homens Nunca Saberão Nada Disto
Colors add meaning to life,Some hidden facts they do imbibe.One color could signify two things,The onus lies on us,As to how we take it.
— Garima Jain, Shades Of Life
You know what's wrong with scientific power?... It's a form of inherited wealth... Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual Guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to his with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of the getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step... There is no discipline... no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature... A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
Finally, I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
— Thomas Merton
I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.
— Guy de Maupassant
Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.
— Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. In logotherapy, love is not interpreted as a mere epiphenomenon of sexual drives and instincts in the sense of a so-called sublimation. Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a vehicle of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love. Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
If you do not understand yourself, you will never understand the world around. The biggest world is within, outside views are our perceptual creation.
— Rajen Biswa
What is the meaning of life…to give life meaning.
— Clifford Cohen
Roses are for our eyes to adore, but they mean nothing unless you give them to someone you love.
— Chris Paynter, Survived by Her Longtime Companion
Life is just too beautiful if meaning is attached to it, and useless when meaningless!!
— Tripta Arora, The Beauty of Imperfection
I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something.
— Agatha Christie, Endless Night
The hand-plucked rose loses meaning as life is leached. Red love, once clutched to breast, putrefies and is thrown to the midden.The hand leaked life as meaning was pucked. Putrefaction clutched love and was thrown to the midden.
— Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption
Did you help someone today? If you did you know how that feels to truly live and know the meaning of life.
— John J. McDaniel
Sajib had said, What about happiness – can you measure that?Rodney had thought yes, you could measure it by ease of living –how much does a person suffer compared to the next? Now, to make more people happy, how do we eliminate suffering? But happiness, in its strength or fragility, was more complex than comfort. It had so many sources, so many nemeses, and so many pitfalls. He couldn’t, in his right mind, try to instruct the happiness of others.
— Katherine Russell, Without Shame
the meaning of life is to help each other get through. The purpose of life is to live, with all 5 senses, and enjoy the gift
— Grant  Walker
As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.
— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for living and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving around a minor star which is in turn one of unnumbered galaxies... The astronomer tells us.... this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final state of equilibrium in which nothing more can happen. Aeons and aeons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange creatures that inhabited the primeval earth.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Do not weep. Being is enough. There, that is all. I am done...
— Alan Moore, Top 10, Vol. 2
There are many ways to find meaning in life, one of them is the love of art
— Ndiritu Wahome, The Sad Artist and Other Fairytales
The purpose of life is to fall in love, and never get caught.
— Robert  Black
And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one.
— Mark Ravenhill
I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair
People love books because they're searching for answers to deep, unconscious questions - and books get as close as it's possible to get.
— Carla H. Krueger
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you––I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow––this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Why endure verticality when you can be horizontal?
— Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang
She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?"This would normally have riled me... but I had comes to think of her as Dr. Spock form Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical creature, at least with regards to her feels for animals. Like Spock, though, I knew there were one or two things that stirred her, so I gave an honest reply."... to be honest, it doesn't matter. No economy will suffer, nobody will go hungry, no diseases will be spawned. Yet there will never be a way to place a value on what we have lost. Future children will see rhinos only in books and wonder how we let them go so easily. It would be like lighting a fire in the Louvre and watching the Mona Lisa burn. Most people would think 'What a pity' and leave it at that while only a few wept.
— Peter Allison
Fisherman looks for the fish in the middle of a mysterious misty lake
—  mankind looks for the meaning of life in the middle of a mysterious cold space!
Every layer of complexity creates greater distance from life’s simple truths.
— Fennel Hudson, A Waterside Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 2
The meaning of life is basically to be the kind of person you would want to be around.
— Alexei Maxim Russell, Why Not-World
How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?
— Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
This is everybody’s journey: to be experienced and witnessed within the confines of this frailty, which is our human body that moves towards its inevitable end. The only way to strengthen this frailty is to know exactly who you are and do exactly what you know you need to do. To claim your power this way is the only worthwhile journey to be undertaken as a human being.
— Lujan Matus
We are all children in the dark, finding our way together to the light. Many define the light before the light is reached and fix on their defining. There in the dark they clamor for others to embrace their defining, demanding its elevation, and giving it names they claim as sacred. But all are still in the dark, distracted by so many claims to the one way out, all unseen, and fix their take with fear and penalty if not likewise elevated as the one and only way. Whereas I leave it open to what the opening will reveal. Layered writing is my tool to enable the opening to widen, and it is our consciousness, not our physical form that has trouble squeezing through the passageway to the way out of the dark, while so many call out in the dark they know the way, rather than allowing the way to reveal itself. Watch the silent ones, calm in demeanor, who are experienced at leaving ways open, in order to find it. They listen and feel their way, in different ways and on different levels. These have no following to create the clamor, nor seek the glamour the clamor brings. They are simply wise because they leave it open to what the opening may become, rather than what they have been fed from birth, they birth in solitude what might be, allowing layers of ways to formulate and in that way follow in their minds and hearts a revealed and reveled light yet unseen.
— Tom Althouse
Such is life, marked by the ticking of the clock and the call of the alarm until the day it all falls into perpetual silence. For most of us, certainly for this boy, life is not composed of great deeds, but of small actions, and that’s okay. It’s the best I can give and I like it this way.
— Gillibran Brown
Breathing seemed harder in the cemetery, and selfish, somehow...
— Sheri Webber
The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
— Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere
You said that facts are meaningless, unless meanings are put into them. Well, Christianity, the mystery of the individual, is precisely what must be put into the facts to make them meaningful.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Neither death nor wisdom has a full stop. There are only commas-no destinations, only waiting rooms.
— Devdutt Pattanaik
Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention
— Neil Postman
You live," I said, "Knowing you will die. Everyone lives every day knowing they could die at any moment. And yet they carry on. They lift their heads high and carry on and build a beautiful, amazing world. What for, if there is no point? Bravery. Courage. To live knowing death hangs over you. Sweet misery, fragile threads of life and existence, and you still fight for every moment, to be alive and to be as alive as possible.""And the point?""The point, Jane, is for beauty. Simplistic, joyous beauty; complicated, twisted beauty-- the beauty of courage, the beauty of loss. For if there is a Something Else out there, it is surely hidden among the beauty of this world.
— Isabella Rogge, Exhaled: A Novella
At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
Living a lie – pretending everything is fine when we are actually discontented – is hard work and, in the long run, even bad for our health. We pay a high price for compromising on this honesty – and neglecting ourselves. Finding our inner passion, our mission in life, and connecting with who we really are, our spiritual being or our higher self – this is the key to success and fulfilment. Our ‘soul’ purpose is our sole purpose in life.
— Kristiane Backer, From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life
@The integration point is God himself@
— Francis A.Schaeffer
The Moral of life: is not to make lemonade, is not to bite through the hard times, Not to have loss.For you will lose. Hard times do get the best of you. Life doesnt allways hand you lemons. Make the very best of what you have. there are times that you shall doubt yourself. insted reach for apples!Make the best of yourself, Have pride in what you do. You start a Nobody achieve as much as you can and become the best you can. No one has heard of Franklin Stinnett but yet i still get up I try to put words of the wise into anyone i meet.
— franklin stinnett
Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable -why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something?
— Andrei Platonov, Soul
An easy life is rarely meaningful and a meaningful life rarely easy.
— Oliver North, Counterfeit Lies
The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.
— Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation
It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I did not waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.
— Conn Iggulden, Conqueror
In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.
— E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.
— Timothy J. Keller, Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions
In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. . . It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise in how something should be done, afraid or incapable of thinking about why.
— Neil Postman
The purpose of life is to survive,to grow,to accept and adapt changes that happens...And addition to human is to exercise his free will, to learn from experience,to make the most of his time,to live well and to reap what he sow in this life.
— Balenti Peco Ramos
The meaning of life is more than a definition of life.
— M.., The Meaning(s) of Life: A Human's Guide to the Biology of Souls
We are always seeking it, never finding it.
— M.., The Meaning(s) of Life: A Human's Guide to the Biology of Souls
The real failure is to rob this world of the contribution only you can make, and to fail to make work that truly gives you that 'this is what I was created to do' feeling that has no equal.
— David duChemin, A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created
That lady has a piano.It’s nice, but it’s not the running of riversOr the murmuring trees make ..Who needs a piano?It’s better to have earsAnd love Nature.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
The moments you feel to give up your life can create the best moments to grasp fully the meaning of your life!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
We will be advancing beyond just even odds.” – Janett Lee Wawrzyniak, Secret Terror in Wavelengths – Wave Links: Inter-Dimensional
— Janett Lee Wawrzyniak, Secret Terror In Wavelengths - Wave Links
I don’t bother with rhyme. RarelyAre two trees the same, one beside the other.I think and write like flowers have colorBut with less perfection in my way of expressing myselfBecause I lack the divine simplicityOf wholly being only my exterior.I see and I’m moved,Moved the way water runs when the ground is slopingAnd what I write is as natural as the rising wind...
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?
— Orhan Pamuk, Sessiz Ev
Live free, dream loud, be inspired, find your power.
— Ben Herr
It's only when we dare to experience the full anxiety of knowing that life doesn't go on forever that we can experience transcendence and get in touch with the infinite. To use an analogy from gestalt psychology, Non-Being is the necessary ground for the figure of Being to make itself known to us. It's only when we're willing to let go of all of our illusions and admit that we are lost and helpless and terrified that we will be free of ourselves and our false securities and ready for what Kierkegaard calls "the leap of faith."p. 43
— Thomas Cathcart, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
When all the forces in your organism come into play, then life will begin to play around you as well. You'll see what your eyes are closed to now, and you'll hear what you've never heard. The music of your nerves will begin to play, you'll hear the music of the spheres, and you'll listen to the grass grow. Just wait, there's no hurry. It will come in its own time!p. 257
— Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
We no longer get work out of our children
—  today we get meaning.
Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.
— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
One note is not music. It is what lies between the notes that makes the music. And what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, "What is the meaning of life?" is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, "Where is the meaning in life?" The place to look is: between.
— Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
One of the greatest gifts that God gives to each of us is the love we share with our family, friends, and fellowmen. It is this divine gift of love that enriches us, gives meaning and purpose to life, and makes it all worth living. Everything else in life is secondary. Everything. And when our time here on earth is over, our lives will not be measured by the riches we accumulate, the honors we receive, the degrees we acquire, or the professional success we achieve, but by our capacity to love and be loved.
— Mike Ramsdell, A Train to Potevka
Tree' is the title of a dance, is the cadence of a song. The black silhouette is only a moment of stillness caught by the shutter of the eye. It is finely tuned to the harmonics of the air. It loves both the sun and the wind and is let turn towards its beloved and so become itself.This is the dance of all living things. This is why endangered peoples say if they have their dance they will never die.
— Amanda Fieldsend, One from the Sea
The only meaning our lives have is the meaning we give them.
— Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple
As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross, but merely as a duty, and does battle with it with dignity.He had devoted much mental care to his heart and its wise laws. Observing the reflection of beauty on the imagination, both consciously and unconsciously, then the transition from impression to emotion, its symptoms, play, and outcome and looking around himself, advancing into life, he derived for himself the conviction that love moves the world like Archimede's lever, that it holds as much universal and irrefutable truth and good as misunderstanding and misuse do hypocrisy and ugliness.p. 494
— Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.
The meaning is hidden in man, but it is only man himself who can find it.
— Liv-Christine Hoem
She had stumbled on what was possibly the ultimate truth, the greatest wisdom of all - the search for knowledge never ends. It goes on and on forever.
— Michael Oehley
It made our presence in the world meaningful
—  we still served a purpose.
If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and reverently work with it; if there is none, philosophy wishes to know that also, and face it without fear. If the stars are but transient coagulations of haphazard nebulae, if life is a colloidal accident, impersonally permanent and individually fleeting, if man is only a compound of chemicals, destined to disintegrate and utterly disappear, if the creative ecstasy of art, and the gentle wisdom of the sage, and the willing martyrdom of saints are but bright incidents in the protoplasmic pullulation of the earth, and death is the answer to every problem and the destiny of every soul--then philosophy will face that too, and try to find within that narrowed circle some significance and nobility for man.
— Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy
The basis of your life is absolute freedom, the goal is joy, and the result of that perfect combination is motion forward, or growth. Your goal is to find objects of attention that let your cork raise.
— Abraham Hicks
We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.
— Viggo Mortensen
It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
— W. Somerset Maugham
In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.
— Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
Or help one fainting RobinUnto his Nest againI shall not live in vain.
— Emily Dickinson
Dolmens constantly remind us to live in harmony with nature, to live within our needs and not in our greed. It reminds us that we should keep on helping everyone in need; not only those who are right in front of our eyes, but everyone and everything that are interconnected in time and space. Only abstract consequences of our good deeds and our kind actions continue to exist as soul and connect us with the past, present and upcoming generations. Rest of it will be molten into nothingness!
— Kandathil Sebastian
I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Toward the end of his book, Miller explains his need to unite science and religion: science does not explain the meaning and purpose of life. That may be, but why should we assume religion explains such things any better? Just because religion attempts to answer such questions does not mean its answers are correct. And such answers never seem to achieve any consensus. What is the meaning of life? Your answer is as good as mine--or just as bad.
— G.M. Jackson, Debunking Darwin's God: A Case Against BioLogos and Theistic Evolution
Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
— Julian Fellowes, Past Imperfect
Science could potentially do a better job explaining the meaning of life if scientists devise experiments that can weed out the best answers from the worst. The principle difference between religion and science is as follows: the religious make stuff up to explain what they don't understand. Scientists do the same, but scientists run their ideas through a very rigorous filter that consists of logic, experimentation and peer review. Such a filter eliminates the worst ideas and preserves the best.So if a scientist answers the question, "What is the meaning of life," his answer, at the very worst, is no less valid than an answer that comes from the highest witchdoctor or priest.
— G.M. Jackson, Debunking Darwin's God: A Case Against BioLogos and Theistic Evolution
Jesus was not a carpenter forever.
— Chris Matakas
I don’t claim to know an over-arching ‘Meaning of Life,’ but I do operate under the understanding that life should not be lived under the pretense that it is simply a test propagated by an invisible, intangible, Creator-God. And it should not be spent identifying with religious traditions and organized groups that, historically, have been at the root of a tremendous amount of oppression and violence.
— David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
I still do not understand why some people think they mean nothing to anyone
—  while their simple smile gives unlimited reasons for others to live.
Ordinary people who live their lives peacefully, whose days gently resemble each other, may happen one day to stop and wonder why and what for do they do the things they do and have been doing for so many years?
— Haim Shapira, מחשבות לעת לילה
Lord, give me what you have made me want; I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired; perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for.
— Anselm of Canterbury
the most radical question which anyone can be asked is not how much their possessions cost, but whether they have found something of value - that is, something that makes living worthwhile.
If you reconnect with nature and the wilderness you will not only find the meaning of life, but you will experience what it means to be truly alive.
— Sylvia Dolson, Joy of Bears
Nothing matters when you are dead, and, you are dead when nothing matters.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Everything is meaningless
— Anonymous
What is the meaning of life?" asked man."Seek and ye shall find," said God. "That was my method."The man replied, "How might I do that?""Take a setting," instructed God. "Add some dirt and water, mold it into something likeable. Let there be light to break up the darkness. Plant some trees and fruit. Don't forget to put in a few animals. Then create a few wild things that are as curious in thought as you, and let them figure the damned thing out.
— J. Edward Vance, Provoked
My Name Is Landon And Im 12 Years Old. Im No Philosepher Or a Religous Person. But Everyone Asks The Question, "Whats The Meaning Of Life. I Think The Meaning Is Also The Question... I Think We Live Life To Wonder... And To Ask, "What Is The Meaning Of Life". The Live To Get To The End And Find Out Why They Lived And What Was Their Purpose...
— Landon I Taylor
If your education, talent and capacity can do nothing; your body can do lots of things.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I made sure to pay attention to everything I was doing. To be fully in the moment. Because that's all life is, really, a string of moments that you knot together and carry with you. Hopefully most of those moments are wonderful, but of course they won't all be. The trick is to recognize an important one when it happens. Even if you share the moment with someone else, it is still yours. Your string is different from anyone else's. It is something no one can ever take away from you. It will protect you and guide you, because it IS you. What you hold here, in your hand, in this box, this is my s
— Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
The wonderful things in life are the things you do, not the things you have.
— Reinhold Messner
In order to lead a meaningful life, you need to cherish others, pay attention to human values and try to cultivate inner peace.
— Dalai Lama XIV
I blame my dad for my sweet tooth. His motto was 'Life is short
—  eat dessert first.' How can I argue with that?
There are essentially two questions in life - a spiritual question and a material question. The spiritual question is 'Who am I?' The material question is 'What am I to do with my life?' One leads to the other.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn't, you died- or stopped growing - which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best.-Deuce, (183)
— Ann Aguirre, Outpost
What else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone?
— Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper
What was the point of finding something worth living for if my life was no longer in my own hands?
— Brodi Ashton, Neverfall
Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?
— Paul Auster, Timbuktu
... things are the way they are in our universe because if they Weren't, we would not be here to notice.
— Brian Greene
Love is seeking the good and being the good.
— Erica Goros