Quotes About Fulfillment

she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

although i know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness

When a man finds the one woman who is right, it scarcely matters what else is wrong. ~ Emerson Berkley

There are a few things that touch your soul, that you know you were put on this earth to see to fruition.

Every need I have is met and most of my desires. I have a peace and joy in my life that I don't even understand. So, this can't be anything but God.

At forty-three, I bought my first house. I'd wanted one like crazy. A house meant family, a happy childhood for my litttle girl and for the little girl self inside me. . . . I was soon overwhelmed by the upkeep and overcome by the yardwork. . . . In the bright light of closing, it was obvious: it was never a house I wanted; it was what a house symbolized to me. (254)

Why did people think having a job was such a great thing? No matter how much fun you had the night before, you still had to get up early, get shaved and dressed, and go to some business where people expected you to be pleasant and do some work.

Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man's Garden, observes that it is not important for a garden to be beautiful in everyone's eyes. But it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden. Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth.

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

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 .

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire.

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to those questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.

As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.