Quotes on Meaning

2
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
– Carl Jung

3
“Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”
– Alfred Adler

4
“Silence is better than unmeaning words.”
– Pythagoras

5
“Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life”
– Eli Wiesel

6
“You see, it’s never the environment; it’s never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events – how we interpret them – that shapes who we are today and who we’ll become tomorrow.”
– Tony Robbins

7
“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
– C.S. Lewis

8
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

9
“Man – a being in search of meaning.”
– Plato

10
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
-Carl Jung

11
“There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”
– John Stuart Mill

12
“When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”
– Chinese Proverb

13
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
– Gandhi

14
“One can choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
– Viktor Frankl

15
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
– Confucius

16
“Your imagination is your preview to life’s coming attractions.”
– Albert Einstein

17
“There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened.”
-Mark Twain

18
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
– Albert Einstein

19
“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”
– Robert Byrne

20
“The purpose of our lives is to be happy.”
– Dalai Lama

21
“I learned at least this by my experiments. That if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
– Henry David Thoreau

22
“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.”
– Stanley Kubrick

23
“Religion is something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.”
– Alfred North Whitehead

24
“Success demands singleness of purpose.”
– Vince Lomardi

25
“To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

26
“There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”
– Napoleon Hill

27
“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”
– Helen Keller

28
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
– Pablo Picasso

29
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
– Ayn Rand

30
“All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.”
– Brian Tracy

31
“The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.”
– Bertrand Russel

32
“Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

33
“A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.”
– David Hume

34
“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”
– John Cage

35
“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

36
“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.”
– Danny Kaye

37
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
– Anne Frank

38
“Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think.”
– Horace

39
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”
– John W. Gardner

40
“Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.”
– Patricia A. McKillip

41
“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.”
– Rebecca Solnit

42
“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
– C.S. Lewis

43
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
– Howard Thurman

44
“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
– Rollo May

45
“If we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

46
“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”
– Albert Einstein

47
“The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.”
– Neils Bohr

48
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
– Henry David Thoreau.

49
“Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.”
– Dieter Rams

50
“I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.”
– Karlheinz Stockhausen

51
“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.”
– Dalai Lama

52
“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.”
– Paul Ricoeur

53
“Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.”
-Douglas Hofstadter

54
“Human action is purposeful behavior.”
– Ludwig von Mises