Quotes About Life

the conclusion is even stronger—it's not merely that there exist some people who are both happy and have lives with meaning. It's that there is a correlation: happy people are more likely to say that their lives are meaningful, and people who say that their lives are meaningful are more likely to say that they're happy.

have no dramatic tension and would be boring. Finally, a focus on obstacles makes clear how the attraction of aversive fiction connects to what draws us in real life. In our actual lives, we seek out projects with difficulty and struggle, ones that involve surmounting obstacles. This is a large part of what gives life meaning.

Some people engage in meaningful pursuits, and this, I argue, makes their lives better. But people don't have to think about meaning for this to work. People who mountain-climb, for instance, might have an entirely mistaken theory of what climbing does for them, just as someone who exercises might have an entirely wrong theory of the benefits of exercise.

Kahneman: Altogether, I don't think that people maximize happiness in that sense. And that's one of the reasons that I actually left the field of happiness, in that I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn't seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.

Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that when we think about our overall lives, we tend to compare ourselves with others—and when it comes to social comparison, the sky is the limit.

We scream when we are in pain. But, weirdly, we also scream for the opposite of pain—intense pleasure, joyous surprise, great excitement. Have you seen the videos of fangirls in the sixties in the presence of the Beatles? They positively shriek. Crying is also triggered by opposites. You might cry on the worst day of your life and on the best. Weddings and funerals; the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones," writes Richard Dawkins. After all, we're the ones who got to exist in the first place.

The purpose of life," Peterson has written, "is finding the largest burden you can bear and bearing it," while Žižek believes that "the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle.

He concluded that the answer is meaning. Those who had the best chance of survival were those whose lives had broader purpose, who had some goal or project or relationship, some reason to live. As he later wrote (paraphrasing Nietzsche), "Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how.

It's not just me. When you ask people, "How often, if at all, do you think about the meaning and purpose of life?" or "In the bigger picture of your life, how personally significant and meaningful to you is what you are doing at the moment?," parents—both mothers and fathers—say that their lives have more meaning than those of non-parents.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

We've never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We're hanging on to the outside for all we're worth, convinced we're going to fall off at the next bump.

We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Few experiences in life are more universal than pain, which flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life. I

I think we Americans, of all people, understand the importance of a good, legal, constitutional framework as the basis of political life.

When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.

It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.

Every morning is like a new reincarnation into this world. Let us take it then for what it is and live each moment anew.

It does not lie within man's power to gain more than a glimpse of this diviner life.

Although it comes only for a few minutes in most cases, its bloom endures and

Life remains what it is--deathless and unbound. We shall all meet again. Know what you are, and be free. The best counsel today is, keep calm, aware. Don't let the pressure of mental environment break into what you know and what is real and ultimately true. This is your magic talisman to safeguard you; cling to it. The last word is--Patience! The night is darkest before dawn. But dawn comes.