Life Finds Its Meaning Quotes & Sayings

What do you know of the Knights?" he asked.

Fin shrugged. "I thought knights were only in children's stories until a few days ago."

Jeannot smiled. "A man could do worse than to live in the stories of a child. There is, perhaps, no better remembrance."

"Until the child grows up and finds out the stories aren't true. You might be knights, but I don't see any shining armor," Fin said.

Jeannot stopped near the gate of the auberge and faced her. "Each time a story is told, the details and accuracies and facts are winnowed away until all that remains is the heart of the tale. If there is truth at the heart of it, a tale may live forever. As a knight, there is no dragon to slay, no maiden to rescue, and no miraculous grail to uncover. A knight seeks the truth beneath these things, seeks the heart. We call this the corso. The path set before us. The race we must run. — A.S. Peterson

According to Darwin's theory, it's not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race. — Svetlana Alexievich

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness,
whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life finds its meaning and answers from what life does to serve others. — Debasish Mridha

The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment. — Rollo May

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent
of his genius, if you will
is the richness he finds in such a life's voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium. — Paul Strand

Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and
follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand
years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a
reason to live - to learn, to discover, to be free! — Richard Bach

The shaman no longer looks for meaning in life, but brings meaning to every situation. The shaman stops looking for truth and instead brings truth to every encounter. You don t look for the right partner, you become the right partner. And then the right partner finds you. It s a very active practice focused on healing. — Alberto Villoldo

It's one thing to go through a crisis grandly, yet quite another to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, and no one paying even the remotest attention to us. — Oswald Chambers

(about sailors) Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them - the ship; and so is their country - the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. — Joseph Conrad

The theist can only find meaning by leaving this life for a transcendental world beyond the grave. The human world as he finds it is empty of 'ultimate purpose' and hence meaningless. Theism thus is an attempt to escape from the human condition; it is a pathetic deceit. — Paul Kurtz

Living is the purpose of life,
And meaning can be found therein.
I finds thou.
Thou becomes it.
And it begins again. — Ken Kesey

The family is the key to Christmas. The family is the key to Christianity. Pope Saint John Paul II noted that everything good - history, humanity, salvation - "passes by way of the family."1 When God came to save us, he made salvation inseparable from family life, manifest in family life. Since the family is the ordinary setting of human life, he came to share it, redeem it, and perfect it. He made it an image and sacrament of a divine mystery. Salvation itself finds meaning only in familial relations. — Scott Hahn

I have been thinking over what she said about knowing as distinct from remembering. Perhaps all it amounts to is that as we talked and I trotted out these little bits of information I gave the impression, common in elderly people, not only of having a long full life behind me that I could dip into more or less at random for the benefit of a younger listener, but also of being undisturbed by any doubts about the meaning and value of that life and the opinions I'd formed while leading it; although that suggests knowingness, and when she said, 'What a lot you know' she made it sound like a state of grace, one that she envied me in the mistaken belief that I was in it, while she was not and didn't understand how, things being as she finds them, one ever achieved it. — Paul Scott

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

What is the hope that can give meaning to life? Without some form of hope, the Holy Father argues that life becomes tedious and potentially burdersome, even if it is marked by material influence and technical progress. The person without hope finds himself in an existential difficulty: For what enduring purpose am I clinging to this life that I love and do not want to lose? — Raymond J. De Souza

Both of my parents had a change of career. My mum was a nurse, and now she's a college lecturer. — Laura Fraser

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side. — Elizabeth Goudge

The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end. — Octavio Paz

To you I speak with much hesitation about suffering. . . . But there is an introduction to suffering which comes with the birthpains of Love. And in such suffering one finds for the first time how deep and profound is the nature and meaning of life. And in such suffering one sees, as if one's eye were newly opened upon a blinding light, . . . And there too is suffering, but there, above all, is peace and victory. — Thomas Kelly

Each of us carries the map of our lives on our skin, in the way we walk, even in the way we grow. — Kiran Millwood Hargrave

In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see. — Dean Koontz

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards. — Peter Sloterdijk

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds. — Robert Anderson

Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it. — Ian Anderson