Life Quotes

When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

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.

~ Rollo May

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

There is no science without spirituality, spirituality has no meaning without science.

~ Debasish Mridha

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

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

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

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

The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.

~ A.j. Darkholme

What's the use in prolonging life if you don't do anything with it?

~ A.j. Darkholme

In modern society the term no have changed meaning. It now seems to be an abbreviation for Negotiations Open.

~ Jury Nel

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

~ Corrie Ten Boom

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

We don't experience our professional and personal lives as separate worlds, they are intertwined and holistic.

~ Tom Hayes

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

[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

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

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

If you want meaning in your life you must give your life meaning.

~ Bryant Mcgill

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

~ Anton Chekhov

Life is a thick dictionary, where you can find the meaning of anything.

~ Gwenth

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

~ Álvaro De Campos

The meaning of life is not a search—it is a choice. Meaning is not found in things; meaning is what you make of things. The world means nothing by itself. You give it all the meaning it has. Thus, the meaning of life is a choice you make, not just once, but every waking hour of your day. 

Life is like art—it is all about interpretation. The moment anything happens to you, you interpret a meaning for it. The meaning you vote for then governs your perception, your thinking, your faith, your choices, your feelings, your behaviors, everything! Whenever you elect a new meaning, this changes everything.

~ Robert Holden

We all have an opportunity and responsibility to create a legacy. A legacy which is resilient, sustainable and authentic. - Jim Cookson, Doctoral Student, Ashridge Business School, UK, August 2014

~ Jim Cookson

Life is like this roller coaster you can’t wait to be tall enough and old enough to get on. But when you get on it you realize you’re afraid of roller coasters.

~ Evan Rauch

When we are courageous enough to begin exploring the ‘Why’s” and the ‘Who’s' of life, the ‘How’s’ and ‘What’s’ of life start to come into focus as well. 

~ Mac Mackenzie

The spiritual journey is an adventure of exploration that gradually starts to open up before us when we are ready to begin asking the questions, “Who am I? and “Who are you?

~ Mac Mackenzie

I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God’s existence isn’t important. It’s what we do with what we’ve got that counts.

~ Michael Ruse

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

~ Brian Selznick

Theism, as religious people typically hold it, does not merely state that some entity created the universe, but that the universe was created specifically with humans in mind as the most important part of creation. If we have any understanding at all of how an intelligent agent capable of creating the material universe would act if it had such an intention, we would say it would not create the huge structure we see, most of it completely irrelevant for life on Earth, with the Earth in such a seemingly random location, and with humans appearing only after a long and rather random course of evolution.

~ Tim Maudlin

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.

~ Ernst F. Schumacher

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Nothing in this life will bring true meaning and happiness apart from God.

~ Jim George

Meaning is often found embedded in the silent moments of our lives when we can hear and see what matters most, the things audible and visible only to the spirit.

~ Toni Sorenson

Meaning. If you're going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.

~ Franny Billingsley

There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays.The happy man does not look back. he doesn’t look ahead. he lives in the present. but there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. to find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment.But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. What have you chosen: happiness or meaning?'The interpretation of murder

~ Jed Rubenfeld.

I envision a world in which the vast majority of us are actively striving toward our potential as human beings by spending our lives serving others through mediums we are most passionate.

~ Chris Matakas

With battle-weary arms, Sheridan slugged his way across the luminous waves sending light-filled droplets splashing into the air like Fourth of July sparklers.Stumbling onto the lake’s rocky banks, he clawed desperately at the animal skin suit, yanking at the fastenings and peeling back the suffocating shroud in a fitful temper tantrum. He collapsed onto the glitter washed shore, his chest heaving, his forehead pulsing with pumped up veins.“That was a nightmare!” Sheridan rasped between gulps of air. “Like some sort of freaked-out acid trip!”“All suffering comes bearing a gift. Every pain is a portal. You must look at the hand of your suffering to see the gift it offers and peer into your pain to see where it may lead.” Kunchen said calmly.

~ Phillip White

You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. the stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

~ Donna Tartt