77 Quotes About Man’s Quest to Find the Meaning of Life
As it’s our human nature to exist temporarily, many people want to make their time have value. The meaning of life is conceived through a variety of things such as relationships and achievements. Others find worth in accomplishing goals in their field of work, in creativity and in charity. In spite of taking some time for one to pinpoint what that is, the result is always rewarding. Being warm hearted and standing by someone in need is of essential value not only to the giver but the receiver as well. A great number of famous individuals have found answers to their quest and have also discovered a meaning of life in generosity.
They have also been inspired and have gone beyond their limits to become who they are today. The path you choose doesn’t really matter as long as you find the essence of your life. Read on to find an incredible selection of quotes that renowned celebrities such as movie stars, scientists, spiritual leaders and more have expressed. Their words of wisdom encourage, motivate and inspire you, friends and loved ones to enjoy and to always keep an eye on what matters. Never forget the meaning of life is to live it meaningfully.
Table of Contents
- Inspirational Meaning Of Life Quotes
- Short Inspiring Meaning of Life Quotes
- Insightful Quotes About the Meaning Of Life
- Famous Meaning Of Life Quotes
- Deep Quotes About The Meaning Of Life
- Literature Quotes About The Meaning Of Life
- Cynical Meaning Of Life Quotes
- Funny Quotes About The Meaning Of Life
Inspirational Meaning Of Life Quotes
- Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. Joseph Campbell
- To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. Robert Louis Stevenson
- God has a purpose for your pain, a reason for your struggle and a gift for your faithfulness. Don’t give up. Unknown
- The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence. Woody Allen
- Difficulties in your life don’t come to destroy you, but to help you realize your hidden potential. Unknown
- Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self. Will Durant
- Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life. Elie Wiesel
- Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Henry David Thoreau
- The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life. Rabindranath Tagore
- The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer. Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them. Dalai Lama XIV
- Life takes on meaning when you become motivated, set goals and charge after them in an unstoppable manner. Les Brown
- When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It’s very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value. That’s the meaning of life, it’s that simple. Temple Grandin
- To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason. Johann Gottfried Herder
- True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it. Pliny the Elder
- The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning. Niels Bohr
- The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away. David Viscott
Short Inspiring Meaning of Life Quotes
- I go to seek a Great Perhaps. François Rabelais
- The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself. Albert Camus
- Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. Albert Einstein
- Life is problems. Living is solving problems. Raymond E. Feist
- The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. Leo Tolstoy
- What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful. Dalai Lama XIV
- Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life. Leo Tolstoy
- To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. Robert Louis Stevenson
- The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself. W. Somerset Maugham
- Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. Henry Miller
- The meaning of life is that it is to be lived. Bruce Lee
- Life is a fairy tale. Live it with wonder and amazement. Welwyn Wilton Katz
- The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire. Slavoj Žižek
- The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. Nelson Henderson
- The meaning of life is to live a meaningful life. Bill Phillips
- To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead. Alan Wilson Watts
- The meaning of life is to see. Huineng
- This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what’s so. Werner Erhard
- Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life. Novalis
Insightful Quotes About the Meaning Of Life
- You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. Albert Camus
- Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have — and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life. Philip Appleman
- The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
- As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion. Yuval Noah Harari
- Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary. Eckhart Tolle
- If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. Viktor E. Frankl
- So if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is.
The answer isn’t a story. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Famous Meaning Of Life Quotes
- You just decide what your values are in life and what you are going to do, and then you feel like you count, and that makes life worth living. It makes my life meaningful. Annie Lennox
- In order to lead a meaningful life, you need to cherish others, pay attention to human values and try to cultivate inner peace. Dalai Lama
- We’re here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark. Whoopi Goldberg
- So when I think of, what is the meaning of life, to me, that’s not an eternal unanswerable question. To me it is in arms reach of me every day. Neil deGrasse Tyson
- We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. Toni Morrison
- There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. Anaïs Nin
- I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got. Hermann Hesse
- If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect. Leo Tolstoy
Deep Quotes About The Meaning Of Life
- Finding meaning in your life is not a difficult thing, but it is harder than living a numb, fast-paced superficial life. Juanita Gomez
- Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well? Kurt Vonnegut
- We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. Ursula K. Le Guin
- He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man. Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada
- It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters. Amit Ray
- I don’t know the meaning of life. I don’t know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it’s a complete mystery. Charles M. Schulz
- There are essentially two questions in life – a spiritual question and a material question. The spiritual question is ‘Who am I?’ The material question is ‘What am I to do with my life?’ One leads to the other. Rasheed Ogunlaru
- Come, dry your eyes, for you are LIFE, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes, and let’s go home. Alan Moore, Watchmen
- The only real freedom the human animal can achieve is the release from meanings. If we don’t have anywhere in particular to go, we can never be lost; if we have nothing to prove, we can never fail. Giannis Delimitsos
Literature Quotes About The Meaning Of Life
- It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
- Just tell me why; why the f***g why?” To which the universe would hollowly respond, “My ways cannot be known, oh man.” Which is to say, “My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me. Philip K. Dick, VALIS
- For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite. Leo Tolstoy
- We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die. Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
- I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that’s it, I want to find something. Agatha Christie, Endless Night
- All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard’s train to Westchester—but without hangovers. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
- What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
Cynical Meaning Of Life Quotes
- The meaning of life is that it ends. Franz Kafka
- You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered. Stephen King
- The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied. Douglas Adams
- It is a great misunderstanding to want to discover something worth living for. Shichirō Fukazawa
Funny Quotes About The Meaning Of Life
- My cat knows the meaning of life, but has no interest in sharing the secret. Ashleigh Brilliant
- The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is…42! Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- I’m twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don’t understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons. Woody Allen
- Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
- Energy is what I believe all of us are. We’re just conscious awareness dancing for itself for no other reason but to stay amused. Jim Carrey
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