Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies...

How can we know the dancer from the dance? Did Yeats create his poems, or did his poetry make him a poet? How does one separate the creator from hiscreation? They create each other. On a mutual plane of reference, one has no existence without the other.

Write as if life has no meanings without writing.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.

And what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not the wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow...

In teaching the young you have to satisfy the schoolchild in yourself and enter the region where all meanings start. That is where, in any case, the philosopher has perpetually to start.

I live my life in widening circleThat reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one,But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower.I have been circling for thousands of years,And I still don’t know: am I a falcon,A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]

If we focus on the minuses, we go down the spiral. But if we are able to focus on the pluses, we can become stronger and put more meaning into our life.

At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.

comes closer to the core meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The process of reclaiming the self is one of reconciliation with meaning.

Life is not a matter for simple optimism–for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism–for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

…The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész’a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images ‘spoke too much’; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is...

God, it’s like reality’s completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can’t decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren’t there for me anymore.

The true meaning and purpose of life is to give some meaning and purpose to your life.

You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to love any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain...

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what...

Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough,...

It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone...

‘Mysticism’ here means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world.

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.

Why does every road eventually narrow into a point at the horizon? Because that’s where the point lies.

The meaning of life is not a search—it is a choice. Meaning is not found in things; meaning is what you make of things. The world means nothing by itself. You give it all the meaning it has. Thus, the meaning of life is a choice you make, not just once, but every waking hour...

Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivreN’a plus rien a dissimuler

The key to living a purposeful life lies in identifying how best you can be a vehicle for God’s divine love and light.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

Sex means nothing–just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

I, sometimes, fear that probably I’ll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I’ll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.

…WHAT DID YOU DO TODAY…that counts?…that carries meaning?…that made the day worthwhile?…what will you do tomorrow?

Ever felt like you are more than flesh and bones and blood that decay back into cosmic dirt? You are. Your existence did not begin with your birth and it will not end with your death. Your soul lived before and will live on and on and on…so what you do now matters later. Choose...

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.

Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only ‘pseudo problems,’ because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character....

The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty.(…) Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

There’s no meaning in a market if traders cannot sell or buy when they want.

The meaning of life in western secular society is to be successful. So many people are success mad and they are encouraged to reach for something and have so called “worthwhile goals”. Money, fame, power, good looks, possessions are the indicators of success and the media and advertising companies exploit this. People are conditioned to...

If you put it as ‘complex nervous systems’ it sounds pretty deflationary. What’s so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry… to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked ‘What’s so special about...

I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.

Man is originally characterized by his “search for meaning” rather than his “search for himself.” The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.

You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to...

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we...

I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over – at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself I have to admit that I too endlessly repeat the same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words,...

[T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won’t give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The...

A VIP area is nothing without not-so-important people.

We can’t stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch,...