Quotes About Life's Meaning

“A life's meaning comes not from the manner in which one dies, but in the manner in which one lives.”

— Mike Kalmbach

“There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.”

— André Breton

“... but he realized he would never reconcile himself to life as something other than a prelude. What's life's meaning then? What is it? What does make the world go round, not letting hope die? What do people dream about, watching the endless flow of years? They dream. A dream, that's it. We live for our only dream, which can lead us, hand in hand, through our life; for the dream we reconcile ourselves to any frustrations and we shall struggle for releasing its silky wings from the net of reality. (The right to a mistake.)”

— Lara Biyuts

“The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”

— Carl Sagan

“We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.”

— Carl Sagan

“Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.”

— Ravi Zacharias

“The neurotic preoccupied with his symptom is led to believe that his central task is one of confrontation with his particular obsession or phobia. In a sense his neurosis allows him to take control of his destiny-to transform the whole of life's meaning into the simplified meaning emanating from his self-created world.”

— Ernest Becker

“The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.”

— Bill Watterson

“The alternative connection to what is ultimate is, of course, revelation. In this view, it is not the human being reaching up to seize the meaning of life, or gazing into itself for that meaning, but God reaching down to explain life's meaning. In this understanding, there can be no speaking of God, no speaking of meaning, before his speaking to us is heard. This way was treated rudely by the Enlightenment luminaries because it both limited human freedom in shaping the meaning of reality and resorted to what was miraculous in the way revelation has been given. And it has not been treated any more kindly by the postmoderns for whom its grand, overarching Story is anathema and who do not believe that they can escape their own subjectivity. But this is the Christian confession.”

— John Piper

“To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life's meaning. Fortunately,”

— C.G. Jung

“Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.”

— Terence McKenna

“Always engage in the quest for life's meaning, which is inner peace.”

— Longchenpa

“The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.”

— E.B. White

“Christ has given us the most glorious interpretation of life's meaning that man has ever had. The fatherhood of God, the fellowship of the Spirit, the sovereignty of righteousness, the law of love, the glory of service, the coming of the Kingdom, the eternal hope- there was never an interpretation of life to compare with that.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

“These dilemmas present perhaps the most enduring conundrum of human history: can people derive their identity primarily by positive association or does life's meaning also require negative comparison to others?”

— William J. Clinton