Finding Meaning Quotes & Sayings

Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning. — Stephen Harrod Buhner

Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions. — Karen Armstrong

Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games. — Jane McGonigal

Adventure begins with you, personally. It is in the way you look at things. It is the mental stance you take as you face your day. It is finding magic in things. It is talking with people and discovering their inner goodness. It is the thrill of feeling a part of the life around you. The attitude of adventure will open things up for you. The world will become alive with new zest and meaning. You'll become more aware of the beauty everywhere. Nothing will seem unimportant. Everything will be revealed as having pattern and purpose. — Wilferd Peterson

Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness
meaning recognize it as yours
then one can take some fear out of the world. — Adam Phillips

Mortals search for what they are unable to give, what they lack within themselves. — Emma Raveling

I do not live when I loose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live really live only when I feel him and seek Him — Leo Tolstoy

It is not a case of finding the meaning for the moments, but giving the moments meaning. — Steven Redhead

Holy Mary Mother of God, what am I to do? There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children, I do not watch television and I do not believe in God - all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. — Muriel Barbery

The object of their desire, the "essential" core of life, is something called authenticity, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time. It is a quest fraught with difficulty, as it takes place at the intersection of some of our culture's most controversial issues, including environmentalism and the market economy, personal identity and the consumer culture, and artistic expression and the meaning of life. — Andrew Potter

Another statistical survey, of 7,948 students at forty-eight colleges, was conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Their preliminary report is part of a two-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Asked what they considered "very important" to them now, 16 percent of the students checked "making a lot of money"; 78 percent said their first goal was "finding a purpose and meaning to my life. — Viktor E. Frankl

Life is less about finding and more about seeking. — Seth Adam Smith

Life is difficult. Not just for me or other ALS patients. Life is difficult for everyone. Finding ways to make life meaningful and purposeful and rewarding, doing the activities that you love and spending time with the people that you love - I think that's the meaning of this human experience. — Steve Gleason

Your perspective on the facts - the context in which you place them and the meaning you give them - really shapes your experience of them. In particular, finding positive meaning in negative events, which is called reframing, is helpful for coping and recovery. This is not to suggest that a tough experience is any less painful, or that it is all right for people to mistreat you. My point is that even a horrible event or situation may have some opportunities in it for a positive experience. — Rick Hanson

I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm — Jose Borges

Finding meaning, like losing meaning, involves pleasure as well as pain. But then losing meaning, like finding it, does too, as the best nonsense reminds us. — Lewis Carroll

For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself. — Bernard Lonergan

We feel most small, we feel most challenged when we're only focusing on ourselves. Because even when you fulfill yourself, meaning you get what you think you want, you still find yourself in a position where it's never enough. — Tony Robbins

Some part of me ... had been waiting, since Kelp's death, for certainty that God ... was either dead or malicious. On the cot, now, in the rain-shadowed room with the medicine smells, I knew it was worse than that. They were a challenge, a dare: you must look at the horrors of the world and find a way back to faith in spite of what you saw. I had a glimpse of what the purer version of myself might be capable of: enduring the loss, keeping the rage and disgust down, finding meaning through suffering. But it was only a glimpse. There was so much shame, and the shame made me angry at the thought of getting better. — Glen Duncan

The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through. — Robert Moss

Remember what I said about finding a meaningful life? I wrote it down, but now I can recite it: Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning. "You notice" he added, grinning, "there's nothing in there about a salary. — Mitch Albom

In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it. — Viktor E. Frankl

Keys to Finding Hope: 1. Hope depends upon taking care that we have at least two alternatives, in every situation we find ourselves, and with every task confronting us. 2. In any situation, no matter how much we may feel we are at the mercy of vast forces out there, that are totally beyond our control, we can always find something that is within our control, however small, and work on that. 3. Nothing that happens to us is just senseless and meaningless. In the context of our total life, it will eventually turn out to have meaning. — Richard Nelson Bolles

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that "the good" exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Everyone faces the challenge of finding meaning to their suffering. — Phil McGraw

Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production. — Alex Tabarrok

My occupation has been a great deal with David Foster Wallace, and he didn't manage it, and he was very much looking for something that isn't totally selfish, and finding meaning. It's a struggle. — Tom Courtenay

The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The dreams we had of finding meaning and fulfillment through our jobs have faded into the reality of professional politics, burnout, boredom and intense competition. — Vicki Robin

Finding meaning in the moment is what gives those meanings a value worth remembering. — Steven Redhead

The process of leniency involves accepting the reality of the current situation and finding a satisfying meaning therein, as opposed to misconstruing or denying the facts of the situation. — Sandra L. Schneider

We are always seeking it, never finding it. — M..

I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become ... This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. — David Malouf

Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures. One — Neil Postman

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness. — Peter J. Carroll

Freedom rests on finding the meaning and lessons even in our greatest pain. — Lee L Jampolsky

Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us. Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis, where we have lost our sense of what is right and wrong, possible and impossible, real and not real. Never underestimate how frightening, angering, confusing, devastating it is to be in that place. Making meaning of what is meaningless is hard work. Soul-searching is painful. This process of making or finding meaning at the end of life is what the chaplain facilitates. — Kerry Egan

For the hundredth time tonight, I'm back with Lulu, on Jacques's barge, the improbably named Viola. She'd just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She'd thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I'd disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It's not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both. — Gayle Forman

When the goals of the Self are the only goals a culture makes available, spirited men and women will address them with the energy that they would have applied to the aspirations of the Soul. The result is lives that are massively frustrating and not a little ridiculous. People become heroically dedicated to middle-class ends - getting a promotion, getting a raise, taking immeasurably interesting vacations, getting their children into the right colleges, finding the best retirement spot, fattening their portfolios. Lives without courage, contemplation, compassion, and imagination are lives sapped of significant meaning. In such lives, the Self cannot transcend itself. — Mark Edmundson

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning, — Bret Easton Ellis

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? — Thomas Merton

Self knowledge is a virtue in its own right. We value the way in which people can fulfill their own natures by gaining an unsentimental self understanding. We think it is good to grow, for all our vices, into someone who is mature enough to face the past and the present, someone who understands how character, in its weaknesses as well as its strengths, is made of interlocking tendencies and gifts that have grown in the course of a life. The image of growth and maturing is Aristotelian rather than Kantian. These ancient values are ideals that none fully achieve, and yet they are modest, not seeking to find a meaning in life, but finding excellence in living and honoring life and its potentialities. — Ian Hacking

Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life. — John Taylor Gatto

That's what I was meaning. Ye've got to have freedom first. It's no use believing what other folks say; the only thing is for each man to fend for himself, Mr. Darnay. Each man standing on his own feet, finding his own path - " "Grand! — D.E. Stevenson

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end. — Gabrielle Zevin

It sounds romantic finding the meaning of life in Tibet, but enlightenment in Tibet is for Tibetans! The meaning of life for most of us is probably in the suburbs. — Andrew Matthews

Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one's life is perhaps the most important part of being human. When we drift into a life without meaning, we soon become a pack of symptoms and pathologies; and without any feeling of significance, many choose to end their lives altogether. — Derren Brown

Keeping what you have is hard like searching for what you've lost. — Auliq Ice

To find meaning in our lives we need consistent exposure to kids, elders and animals ... cuz kids and animals aren't looking for it, and elders are the closest to finding it. — Gregor Collins

A man depends largely on woman for the light in the family as he is not well equipped at finding meaning for himself. Life is often dry and barren for him unless someone bestows meaning on life for him. With a few words, a woman can give meaning to a whole day's struggle and a man will be so grateful. A man knows and wants this; he will edge up to it, initiate little occasions so that a woman can shed some light for him. When he comes home and recounts the events of the day, he is asking her to bestow meaning on them. This is the light-bearing quality of a woman. — Robert A. Johnson

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it? — Jonathan Franzen

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning. — Michael Shermer

To a significant degree, the commitments we make in life define us. They reveal our interests, passions and goals, and give important clues in discerning meaning and finding happiness in life. While many seem to struggle with the archetypal human question, "who am I?" one simple look at who and what you're devoted to, what takes up your time and fires your imagination can clarify your life direction. It can help you to make authentic decisions that are rooted in your deepest convictions. We are happiest when we are in harmony with our passion. — Monks Of New Skete

Sure am glad I'm not royalty," I muttered. "I wouldn't want to have to bump uglies with someone I can't stand. On a regular basis. And no one else."
"Ow!" I exclaimed, trying to yank my fingers from Trent but finding them caught. Then I colored, realizing what I'd said. "Oh ... sorry," I stammered, meaning it. "That was insensitive."
Trent's frown turned into a sly smirk. "Bump uglies?" he said, eyes on the table behind me. "You are a font of gutter slang, Rachel. We must do this again. — Kim Harrison

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. — Anne Lamott

Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness. — Albert Camus

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.
— John H. Groberg

Immediately after discussing the Spirit-filled life, Paul turns to the subject of marriage, showing the tight connection between marriage and the life in the Spirit. And this connection teaches us two things. First, the picture of marriage given here is not of two needy people, unsure of their own value and purpose, finding their significance and meaning in one another's arms. If you add two vacuums to each other, you only get a bigger and stronger vacuum, a giant sucking sound. Rather, Paul assumes that each spouse already has settled the big questions of life - why they were made by God and who they are in Christ. — Timothy J. Keller

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms "success" and "failure" had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. — Paul Auster

It's hurtful somehow to admit this thing and anyway that doesn't mean i'm losing my faith in this beautiful world. But these days now is the time where people have become so much more-excuse me-shallow. When all of the fancy things and outer beauty are demanded, and those who are lost enough to chase and manage to get those things, they will happen to get very nice response from social and able to expand their images and get famous and be seen as someone who has value. Meanwhile those who could see deeper and their souls are insecure of this mad world, they will have smaller space in width but they will dig deeper and deeper into their self, making space in height, finding the true meaning of their souls, the true essential unshakable truth that's beyond the fragile material worldly things. — Reza Rusandi

Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one. — Minae Mizumura

There is a very real danger present when we suppress our feelings to act on inspiration in exchange for the "safety" of the status quo. We risk sacrificing the opportunity to live a more fulfilling and purpose driven life. We risk sacrificing the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others. We risk sacrificing the beautiful blessing of finding a greater sense of meaning in our own lives.
In short, we run the very real risk living a life of regret. — Richie Norton

Finding happiness is not as simple as having good friends or a full social life. The crunch issue is our ability, or inability, to find within ourselves a sense of meaning or deeper purpose, something not found in everyday life. — Mark Vernon

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence. — Alain De Botton

If you come any closer Dal'las I will be forced to tie you to our bedja until we are done with our discussion." "Hmm, I've been meaning to suggest a little rope play in our sex life," she practically purred, truly finding the idea exciting. — Nia K. Foxx

It's all about finding the real meaning, without it everything is meaningless. — Sahel Akmal

It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love. — Pope Benedict XVI

It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange. — Gregory Crewdson

Each of us must become impassioned, finding meaning and self-fulfillment in our own life's journey. — Alexandra Stoddard

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

My dear woman, our greatest problem is
that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water) — Billy Marshall Stoneking

If we were all looking for something 'easy come and easy go', then all of our lives would be easy. The problem is that we look for something real, don't we? And it is this longing for what is real, that makes finding the right person to be the most difficult task in the world. You can marry someone and promise the rest of your life to the person, only to find out later that this person makes you feel lonely. If we had no innate longing for true love and for true partnership, then none of us would have any problems! Therefore, the most frightening question to ponder upon, is, 'what if true love does not exist; what if the real stuff isn't real at all?' In such a case, life would be meaningless. I suppose I would rather believe in love relentlessly, than live in this world meaninglessly. — C. JoyBell C.

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts. — Anais Nin

One of the principal obstacles to the rapid diffusion of a new idea lies in the difficulty of finding suitable expression to convey its essential point to other minds. Words may have to be strained into a new sense, and scientific controversies constantly resolve themselves into differences about the meaning of words. On the other hand, a happy nomenclature has sometimes been more powerful than rigorous logic in allowing a new train of thought to be quickly and generally accepted. — Arthur Schuster

In our hunger for guidance, we were ordinary. The American Freshman Survey, which has followed students since 1966, proves the point. One prompt in the questionnaire asks entering freshmen about "objectives considered to be essential or very important." In 1967, 86 percent of respondents checked "developing a meaningful philosophy of life," more than double the number who said "being very well off financially." Naturally, students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding. Since then, though, finding meaning and making money have traded places. The first has plummeted to 45 percent; the second has soared to 82 percent. — Anonymous

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self. — David Brooks

Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. — Rachel Naomi Remen

It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn't matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it's still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word 'love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or 'fear', or 'suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division. — Krzysztof Kieslowski

Everything on our earth - both the simple and the complicated questions, both the little human problems and the challenges of finding the great path to God, all the secrets of the past, the present, and the future ages - all can be resolved only by such mysterious, ineffably beautiful and omnipotent humility. And even if we cannot understand its truth and meaning, and even if it seems for now that we are not ready for this mysterious and all-powerful humility, nonetheless, that humility by itself will reveal itself to us through those incredible persons who are capable of possessing it. — Tikhon Shevkunov

I saw a dead bird flying through a broken sky. I heard it, and it said, The world will never understand. — Nadege Richards

Rebrand is not just about buzzing brand words; it's about repurposing your lives, finding your true voice and building an authentic brand that impact lives. It's a call to reexamine our lives, our goals and dreams; to think about why we do what we do, to align lives back to source (God) and connect with the hearts of people. It's a movement, to help, to add value, to create meaning, to impact lives. — Bernard Kelvin Clive

What was the point of finding something worth living for if my life was no longer in my own hands? — Brodi Ashton

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose — Martin Seligman

Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing it into a revelation from the outside. The meaning is - there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. But it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal.
So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open? — Paul Goodman

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events. — Aldo Leopold

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. — Joshua Foer

There comes a time when a man must forgo familiarity and venture into uncertainty; risking obscurity, but also quite possibly ... finding meaning. — Jerry J.C. Veit

The song becomes the meaning itself through the vibratory qualities. When we begin to catch the vibratory qualities ... the song begins to sing us ... I don't know anymore if I am finding that song or if I am that song. — Jerzy Grotowski

We kept on cooking and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughter's diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do
to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort when there being no comfort was where they had landed. Then we shopped for groceries. — Anne Lamott

So finding meaning in events is positively correlated with wellbeing but negatively correlated with foresight. — Philip E. Tetlock

It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering? — Mary Doria Russell

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. — Thomas Merton

Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means "one who lives in hiding or under cover." The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning "salt." They were the salt people. — Mark Kurlansky

This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.) — Jorge Luis Borges

Finding happiness is like finding yourself. You don't find happiness, you make happiness. You choose happiness. Self-actualization is a process of discovering who you are, who you want to be and paving the way to happiness by doing what brings you the most meaning and contentment to your life over the long run. — David Leonhardt

Life is about finding . . .
what works best for you. — John-Talmage Mathis

Be content, Be grateful, Be loving, Be happy, and this lifestyle will not only change YOUR life, it will change OUR world. I finally grasped the true meaning of let go- let God. (An excerpt from Finding Inner Peace) — Alice Hocker

The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness. We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about. To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life. But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away, and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living. But to "live for meaning" means not that you try to get something out of life but rather that life expects something from us. In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness.129 — Timothy Keller

Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing
faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives. — Terry Tempest Williams

Finding meaning in life is not about looking for a specific goal. That is a fruitless path. It is about seeking a life path that is the right one for you. Decide on the way you desire to live and do all you can to create that life. Only you can define what pathway is best for you and make choices in that direction.
That being said, everything is possible, once you strive towards it. — Hunter S. Thompson