125 Meaningful Quotes

In a world bustling with activity and noise, sometimes all we need is a touch of wisdom to bring clarity and inspiration to our lives. Words have an incredible power to shift perspectives, uplift spirits, and drive us towards meaningful action. Whether you're seeking motivation, comfort, or a fresh outlook, our curated collection of the top 125 meaningful quotes is bound to resonate with you. Dive into these timeless thoughts and let them inspire your journey.

1. “But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

2. “I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” - Richard P. Feynman

3. “There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.” - Max Barry

4. “Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.” - Ian McEwan

5. “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.” - Edith Wharton

6. “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” - C.S. Lewis

7. “We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.” - Vladimir Nabokov

8. “O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d; Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer.That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.” - Walt Whitman

9. “Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

10. “To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.” - Bill Watterson

11. “The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” - Chris Hedges

12. “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” - R. Dawkins

13. “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” - Emily Dickinson

14. “But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.” - Matthew Arnold

15. “People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.” - Haruki Murakami

16. “Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.” - Jess C. Scott

17. “Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.” - Seth Godin

18. “What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.” - François Jacob

19. “If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.” - Albert Camus

20. “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.” - Jacques Monod

21. “As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.” - Viktor E. Frankl

22. “Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

23. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott

24. “I think of you as a friend. I used to think "friend" was just another word... Nothing more, nothing less. But when I met you, I realized what was important was the word's meaning.” - Masashi Kishimoto

25. “Don't sign your namebetween worlds,surmountthe manifold of meanings,trust the tearstain,learn to live.” - Paul Celan

26. “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.” - Khalil Gibran

27. “Not everything that can be counted counts.Not everything that counts can be counted.” - William Bruce Cameron

28. “For Hood's sake,' the foreigner muttered. 'What's wrong with words?' 'With words,' said Redmask, turning away, 'meanings change.' 'Well,' Anaster Toc said, following as Redmask made his way back to his army's camp,.. 'that is precisely the point. That's their value - their ability to adapt -' 'Grow corrupt, you mean. The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.” - Steven Erikson

29. “Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.” - Tobias Wolff

30. “Why does every road eventually narrow into a point at the horizon? Because that's where the point lies.” - Vera Nazarian

31. “Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.” - Jorge Luis Borges

32. “Why should I even bother? What's the point, really?"He thought for a moment. "Who says there has to be a point?" he asked. "Or a reason. Maybe it's just something you have to do.” - Sarah Dessen

33. “I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” - Hermann Hesse

34. “Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?Look for delusion and truth in thebottom of your own heart.” - Ryokan

35. “On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.” - José Ortega y Gasset

36. “The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.” - Jill Lepore

37. “I am happy.I have something to accomplish, create, and achieve.I am happy.” - Vera Nazarian

38. “Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.” - Lawrence Durrell

39. “What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew” - Robert Browning

40. “Life was a revolving mystery, sometimes terrifying, sometimes maddening. But always provocative. Interesting. And although its meaning seemed beyond my grasp, it never seemed meaningless.” - Christina Meldrum

41. “If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I locked the door of her cell behind me? That would be like saying that the writing of this book, over which I have labored for so many watches, will vanish in a blur of vermillion when I close it for the last time and dispatch it to the eternal library maintained by the old Ultan. The great question then, that I pondered as I watched the floating island with longing eyes and chafed at my bonds and cursed the hetman in my heart, is that of determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.” - Gene Wolfe

42. “When you know that something's going to happen, you'll start trying to see signs of its approach in just about everything. Always try to remember that most of the things that happen in this world aren't signs. They happen because they happen, and their only real significance lies in normal cause and effect. You'll drive yourself crazy if you start trying to pry the meaning out of every gust of wind or rain squall. I'm not denying that there might actually be a few signs that you won't want to miss. Knowing the difference is the tricky part.” - David Eddings

43. “Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.” - Philip Larkin

44. “For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

45. “...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 (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.” - Roland Barthes

46. “I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.” - David Levithan

47. “A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what I've come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.” - Li-Young Lee

48. “A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.” - Anne Rice

49. “if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

50. “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.” - Peter Redgrove

51. “The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.” - Richard Dawkins

52. “...not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.” - Daniel J. Siegel

53. “At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.” - Daniel J. Siegel

54. “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” - Victor Frankl

55. “All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.” - Jodi Picoult

56. “That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]” - John Green

57. “Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven. ” - Novalis

58. “I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.” - Bret Easton Ellis

59. “When you put together deep knowledge about a subject that intensely matters to you, charisma happens. You gain courage to share your passion, and when you do that, folks follow.” - Jerry Porras

60. “Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.” - Salman Rushdie

61. “Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.” - Mary Swan

62. “London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.” - Anna Quindlen

63. “Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, "I did see a few Indians on the way over here." And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren't any there.' I don't remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?” - Haruki Murakami

64. “...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness." (p184)” - Benjamin Hale

65. “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.” - Robert C. Solomon

66. “We have been cut off from our souls in the West, and because romantic love has become our religion, we think we can find fulfillment through this extraordinary and powerful force that draws us into an illusion of permanence. Passion makes us feel alive, makes us sing, makes us feel in touch with something powerful and wonderful, just as it would if we followed this meaning in life in a more spiritual practice. In the West it is often through such relationships, through another human being, that we search desperately for something, not knowing it is to be found within ourselves.” - Sarah Bartlett

67. “Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.” - Alain De Botton

68. “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life 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

69. “The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: ‘And what about man? Are you sure that the the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?” - Viktor E. Frankl

70. “August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--"Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.” - Sue Monk Kidd

71. “I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem. Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It's as if all the knowledge I've soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.” - Daniel Keyes

72. “When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder” - Arthur Conan Doyle

73. “Human beings have their great chance in the novel.” - E.M. Forster

74. “When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.” - Margaret Atwood

75. “Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.” - Criss Jami

76. “To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?” - Criss Jami

77. “The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.” - Carl Sagan

78. “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” - Herbert Stein

79. “Life is filled with unanswered questions, but it is the courage to seek those answers that continues to give meaning to life. You can spend your life wallowing in despair, wondering why you were the one who was led towards the road strewn with pain, or you can be grateful that you are strong enough to survive it.” - J.D. Stroube

80. “And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.” - George R. R. Martin

81. “Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.” - John Connolly

82. “What's in a name?” - William Shakespeare

83. “Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.” - Charlotte Brontë

84. “I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now. That that’s how we find our way toward meaning. Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.” - Franny Billingsley

85. “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 when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.” - Steven L. Peck

86. “The significance of life is living.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

87. “Words have weight.” - Stephen King

88. “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]” - Rainer Maria Rilke

89. “Poetry doesn’t pay. But I need it. And so do you.” - Cory Basil

90. “Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.” - Fernán Caballero

91. “When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” - Margery Williams Bianco

92. “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 of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold. You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren't that young anymore. Now you are going to die. Don't worry. I am here. I won't let you sink. Go on with your reading.” - Michel Houellebecq

93. “I create lies for people in order for them to find something true about themselves. I teach people that lies are doors that opens up to truth. Either you accept the lie, or you run away from it, thus, eliminating the meaning behind it, and what is could have accomplished.” - Lionel Suggs

94. “Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.” - John of Salisbury

95. “Don't be led away to think this part of the world important and that unimportant. Every corner of the world is important. No man knows whether this part or that is most so, but every man may do some honest work in his own corner.” - Thomas Hughes

96. “Life has the meaning we give it, no more, no less.” - Steven Redhead

97. “Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.” - Ralph Ellison in Juneteenth

98. “Art indeed may not change anything, and yet on some very basic level, life is insupportable without it.” - Richard Matturro

99. “As palavras em si mesmas não são nada. São apenas letrinhas agrupadas ou um monte de sons combinados de uma certa maneira, mas que não fazem nenhum sentido por si mesmos. É a gente que dá sentido às palavras. Está tudo em nossa cabeça, nos pequenos detalhes de como as coisas funcionam dentro dela. É só uma questão de como as coisas se processam no cérebro de uma pessoa e de outra, entende?” - Camilo Gomes Jr

100. “Acabei aprendendo que a gente sempre verá alguém reagindo de um jeito diferente, conforme o sentido que uma palavra ganhe na cabeça dessa pessoa. Para você, A pode significar apenas A; já um outro pode entender que A é o que vem antes de B, C e D. Você pode olhar para o copo com água até a metade e achar que está meio cheio, outro pode ver o mesmo copo e pensar que ele está meio vazio. E cada um vai reagir de acordo com o sentido que dá para cada coisa na vida.” - Camilo Gomes Jr

101. “It all meant something. Until it didn't.” - Dave Eggers

102. “Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.” - Robert McKee

103. “Education is that component which brings in a meaningful relationship between the happenings around us and how our senses experience them.” - Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay

104. “Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor?” - William T. Vollmann

105. “Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.” - Terry Pratchett

106. “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

107. “:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.” - Catherine Fisher

108. “The whole purpose of the construction of The Bridge of Silver Wings was to provide a path leading to The River of Winged Dreams, or to serve as a resting place until the river’s deeper and truer nature revealed itself.” - Aberjhani

109. “We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's. But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope. Humility, because if we chose our lot in life, there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth. A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato... So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension in another's misfortune? And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment ,and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.” - Fiona Givens

110. “...there is no map of the soul because we make it up as we go...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain

111. “The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn't quite as stupid and pointless.” - MacDonald Harris

112. “Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic.” - Viktor E. Frankl

113. “Success is meaningless without fulfilment - both begin within” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

114. “Each of us has his own inner concentration camp... We must deal with, with forgiveness and patience-as full human beings, as we are and what we will become.” - Viktor Frankl

115. “Frankl asserts that "the potentialities of life are not indifferent possibilities, but must be seen in the light of meaning and values." Such meaning and values cannot be imposed; each individual must seek out for himself or herself the meaning of each situation and the implications the present moment may have for the future.” - William Blair Gould

116. “Qui n'a plus qu'un moment a vivreN'a plus rien a dissimuler” - Philippe Quinault

117. “The search for meaning in our lives takes us on paths large and small. When we go beyond ourselves-whether in forgiveness, unselfishness, thoughtfulness, generosity and understanding toward others-we enter into the spiritual realm of meaning. By giving beyond ourselves, we make our own lives richer. This is a truth long understood at the heart of all meaningful spiritual traditions. It's a mystery that can only be experienced. And when we do experience it, we are in the heart of meaning. We are no longer a prisoner of our thoughts.” - Alex Pattakos

118. “It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.” - Mircea Eliade

119. “It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years’ time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal.” - Neel Burton

120. “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.” - Van Gogh on "The Night Cafe" painting

121. “Maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we've produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there [...]? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning [...] can be sufficient to drive our behaviour. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.” - Dan Ariely

122. “A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery.” - Kurt Vonnegut

123. “Life isn’t fair. It doesn’t make sense. This unfairness is felt by everyone, from the Las Vegas tunnel dweller all the way to the executive in the high-rise. To some, these “unfair” experiences become a chastening ball and chain attached for the remainder of life.” - John-Talmage Mathis

124. “If only the physical aspects of hatha yoga are used, it is called ghatastha yoga (ghata means “physical effort”). Modern expressions like “fitness yoga” and “power yoga” that flourish within gym classes are within the same category, even if they do not derive from the original exercises’ rhythm and succession. In many instances “power yoga” has a positive effect on physical health; but if there is no aim to ease the mind, to gain self-insight and control of your thoughts, and to experience the divine within you and within the universe, the deeper meaning of yoga and - possibly life - is lost.” - Stig Åvall Severinsen

125. “Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar--I say, you say, he and she, it, on the other hand, does not say--paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.” - Margaret Atwood