Purpose and Meaning of Life

It’s a funny thing about life. If you refuse to settle for anything less than the best, that’s what it will give you.

Nothing can resist the human will that will stake even its existence on its stated purpose.

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give our thought to the body.

The need to find meaning . . . is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

I am an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.

We work to become, not to acquire.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life but that it bothers him less and less.

Will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

The key is not to live but to live well.

No human thing is of serious importance.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

I must go beyond the dark world of sense information to the clear brilliance of the sunlight of the outside world. Once done, it becomes my duty to go back to the cave in order to illuminate the minds of those imprisoned in the ‘darkness’ of sensory knowledge.

Each person must tend to the business that accords with his nature.

Assuredly he will love that most whose interests he regards as identical with his own, and in whose prosperity or adversity he believes his own fortunes to be involved.

A life without investigation is not worth living.

Everybody can be great . . . because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

By losing your goal—you have lost your way, too!

One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.

It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Eloquence is feeling pouring itself to other minds, courting their sympathy.