-anonymous
(more…)Meaning of Life
864 – “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”
–Neil deGrasse Tyson
844 – “Life is not a having and a getting. But a being and a becoming.”
–Matthew Arnold
818 – “An Individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity. Every person must decide at some point, whether they will walk in light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment: Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?'”
–Martin Luther King, Jr
752 – “I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”
–Norman Mailer
750 – “You have been my friend. … That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
–Charlotte in E B White’s Charlotte’s Web [See Source Note for exact quote]
It is Make a Friend Day, so go out and makes some new ones!
453 – “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
–Stanley Kubrick
440 – “Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order, blindly and dumbly, to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”
–Ernest Becker
425 – “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
–Sylvia Plath
419 – “With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, [convenience] threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life.”
“Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.”
–Tim Wu
1000 Quotes Project 