Quotes About Meaning

Sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living.

In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you're doing but the importance of why you're doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn't have been less psychologically damaging if they'd thought of it as "gardening," I got a vicious beating that would've made Kunta Kinte wince.

NEXT EXIT, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?

I'm ghost, the afterlife is just a lay-up away.

But I feel truly wowed by the architecture and the meaning of the architecture if you get lost in it and think about the man hours in the smallest little chapel, and the love involved. God it's fantastic.

En jullie zijn te stom om te begrijpen dat sier het eigenste van de mens is. Dat we daarvan leven, en daarvoor en daarop.

A meaningful life, at least to some extent, has to do with what one does and how one affects people.

Boredom] is a canary in the coal mine of everyday existence, signaling whether we want and are able to cognitively engage with our current activity—and impelling us to action when we do not or cannot. How we respond to boredom matters: blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals.

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.

Emily Esfahani Smith talks about the American Freshman Survey, which found that in the late 1960s, 86 percent of respondents claimed that "developing a meaningful life philosophy" was "essential" or "very important," while in the 2000s, the proportion dropped to 40 percent. She is disappointed in this; she sees it as a bad sign.

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.

Money does make you happy; it's the trying to make money that makes you sad. The trick is to get money in the course of other, meaningful, pursuits

chosen suffering can generate and enhance pleasure, and that it is an essential part of meaningful activities and a meaningful life. And it's often the right thing to do. I'll repeat the quote from Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth." Sometimes pain is a proper acknowledgment of value.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

Perhaps more important, religion provides our species' longest and deepest struggle to make sense of suffering, including suffering that is unchosen.

How we respond to boredom matters: blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals. Empty maladaptive responses, such as self-inflicted electric shocks in the lab, compulsive social media use, or full-scale gambling and drug use, may work to temporarily alleviate boredom, but at what cost?

Smith organizes her own book, The Power of Meaning, around four themes that show up in this summary: Belonging: connecting to and bonding with other people Purpose: finding something worthwhile Storytelling: narratives that bring order to life Transcendence: mystical experiences of self-loss

Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

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.

My friend Graeme Wood, a journalist who has written extensively about ISIS, including a book based on interviews with both new recruits and long-standing members, tells me that many of those who joined the group were jaded when they signed up. They've had a lot of anonymous sex, they've taken every drug there is, they've lived lives of empty pleasure. But this wasn't enough. They were looking for more, something of real value.

But war's appeal is more than belonging, morality, and signaling. As Chris Hedges put it in the title of one of his books, "War is a force that gives us meaning." PERHAPS THE TWO examples so far have left you cold. Maybe you don't want to climb mountains or go to war. But what about having children?

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.

This distinction between empathy and compassion is critical for the argument I've been making throughout this book.