Life Quotes

God is using all of your experiences, both good and bad, to develop your character to match your calling.

~ Lysa Terkeurst

One of the greatest advantages of singleness is the potential for greater focus on Christ and accomplishing work for Him.

~ Elizabeth George

Follow your passion; Do not get married to it, though.

~ Ashok Kallarakkal

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

~ Jackie Robinson

It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.

~ Wendy Mass

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

~ Milan Kundera

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

~ Salman Rushdie

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

So that's it. I've told you everything I know. Think clearly and think for yourself. Learn to use language to express those thoughts. Love somebody with all your heart. And with everyone, whether you love them or not, find out if you can be helpful. But really, it's even simpler than that. After all this time, and all these talks in public and in private, I think I get it now. If I were taking my friend Arnold's suggestion and spoke from my deathbed, I think I know what I'd say. I see now that I had my meaning all along, I just had to notice it. The meaning of life... is life. Not noticing life is what's meaningless, even down to the last second.

~ Alan Alda

Life was a revolving mystery, sometimes terrifying, sometimes maddening. But always provocative. Interesting. And although its meaning seemed beyond my grasp, it never seemed meaningless.

~ Christina Meldrum

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

~ Voltaire

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

What does this beauty or than music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?' In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.

~ Helen Keller

The significance of life is living.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

~ Roberto Bolaño

[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.

~ Samuel Beckett

They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.

~ Paulo Coelho

If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.

~ Loren Eiseley

Believe me. Everything is meant.

~ Ali Smith

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

~ Gregory Maguire

You will not live the life of royalty, if you don't understand the meaning of loyalty.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

Search for truth, not for meaning. Meaning comes from the perspective of a person who interprets the truth.

~ J.r. Rim

The meaning of life is to make life be more.

~ Will Advise

Noise guides only as light blinds.

~ Andy Harglesis

The biggest catch need not be grandest at all.

~ Andy Harglesis

Death is the destroyer and giver of sense.

~ Andy Harglesis

What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning.

~ Raymond Radiguet

Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?

~ Elizabeth Buchan

Time is rarely the limiting factor -- more so, structure often is.

~ Andy Harglesis

No action is safe from meaning.

~ Karan Mahajan

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

~ Adrienne Rich

They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?

~ Jean Thompson

Meaning can be found in action.

~ Andy Harglesis

Definition is a choice.

~ Andy Harglesis

Let us not be judged by actions, but by means.

~ Andy Harglesis

To fully appreciate the depth of love, we must captivate ourselves in the moment. Whether it is fate or humanism, it produces a great capacity for happiness with a throw in of anxiety, grief, and isolation. Use those whales as an insidious beginning to produce meaning and humility in your life.

~ Luis Enrique Cavazos

... And that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something — or tries to. People need things like that to go on living — mental landscapes that have meaning for then, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That what I think.

~ Haruki Murakami

Things mean pretty much what we want them to mean.

~ Ian M. Banks

The question of purpose and meaning becomes obsolete when you think beyond human life.

~ Vatsal Surti