Quotes About Meaning

Metaphysics: One of the main topics of philosophy and a bit of a catchall for everything that isn't logic, epistemology, or ethics. Metaphysics looks at the Big Picture: What is "being"? What is the cosmos and what is it made of? Also, incidentally, what is the meaning of life?

To feel pleasure in any act or activity, you have to pursue some end other than pleasure.

If all you seek from something is pleasure, you'll never find it. All you will feel is noia [existential boredom], often disgust. To feel pleasure in any act or activity, you have to pursue some end other than pleasure.

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?" —ADAM PHILLIPS, BRITISH PSYCHOANALYST AND PHILOSOPHER (1954–), FREUDIAN EXISTENTIALIST

It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that." —THOMAS NAGEL, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER (1937–), ETHICIST AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER

I live with the fact that I don't know if there really is any meaningful cosmic order and, God knows, that is a continual frustration. But I don't understand why it should be any more frustrating to know that there is a grand design but I am unable to understand it. In both cases, I am in the cosmic dark.

Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.

Maybe Francis Bacon had it wrong—at least in Ayer's case. Instead of finding meaning in religion as the result of studying philosophy in depth, Ayer found that meaning by not thinking like a philosopher at all for a few divine moments.

With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting. Enter boredom. A bored man even longs for longing. He has time to fill, but there is nothing compelling to do.

This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.

I am not looking for a thing ; I am searching for a spiritual experience .

The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create.

When all is said and done, this Existentialist precept resonates with me more than any other philosophy of life I know. The idea that life's meaning is not something to look for but something to create myself feels right to me. In fact, it seems absolutely essential.

money isn't just physical; it's a spiritual reality. It's "spiritual" in that it isn't about folded pieces of paper, and it isn't about what those little slips of paper can buy. It is about people and relationships. Money is the buzz; the connection that makes our interpersonal networks rich and fulfilling.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

I think it is much better not to have a goal, but rather to have a path. I think it is much better not to have a goal, but rather to have a path. Taking the path is very vulnerable and threatened by being pulled to the left or to the right, but if you stay on this thin and narrow, straight path, something of an adventure, something of meaning will happen to you

The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning 'to try', whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning 'to see'. Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event.

Poetry, as Allen Ginsberg reminded his friends, is news that stays news.

We all need narrative to make sense of the world.

beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching. For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way—because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is like good parenting.

were to die, even if one's brother or darling son should be killed before one's eyes. The drug is called nepenthê, which means "no grief," the penthê in nepenthê deriving from the noun penthos, "grief." It is, indeed, a word formed much the same way that anodyne, "without pain," the word that points to the origins

The idea was that consumption was a symbolic system we use but we don't understand, in the same way that we speak language clearly without being able to give a lesson in grammar.

Posso fazer só mais uma pergunta? — Faça. — Karu-Sakaibê e Rairu existem de verdade? Minha avó olhou de soslaio para minha mãe, que escutava, atenta, a nossa conversa. Depois, me chamou bem pertinho dela e, encostando sua boca em meu ouvido, sussurrou: — Para quem precisa deles, sim; para quem não precisa, não.