1,900 Quotes About Meaning

If all we are going to do is go through the motions of life: eat, sleep, get married, have children, work, retire and then die...then it's true, life doesn't mean anything. But if we strive to make our life full of meaning and fulfil our purpose, then it all makes sense.

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.

[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.

So might it be that whatever I’ve lost in my life is what creates the space for whatever I’ve yet to gain in my life. Therefore, without loss I am without gain.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.

Our brains hold the magic that allows us to find our stories and to make and remake our meaning.

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as ‘bugs’ or ‘viruses’ in, or ‘mis-activations’ of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.

Whether life has meaning or purpose is irrelevant. What matters is that one has things one likes to do.

Meaning and purpose are not important. What matters is that one has things one loves to do.