Purpose and Meaning of Life

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

For my purpose holds

 

All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. J. R. R.

 

Shape clay into a vessel ; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room ; It is the holes which make it useful. Therefore benefit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there.

Was it worthy? Everything is worthy.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

What is it, then, that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.

Call the world if you please ‘The vale of soul-making’.

Man cannot will unless he has first understood that he can count on nothing but himself: that he is alone, left alone on earth in the middle of his infinite responsibilities, with neither help nor succor, with no other goal but the one he will set for himself, with no other destiny but the one he will forge on this earth.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

Man is a useless passion.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

And nowhere, surely, should we discover more painful and absolute sacrifice. . . . The queen bids farewell to freedom, the light of day. . . . The workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

The unexamined life is not worth living.