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Meaning Of Life Quotes

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Meaning Of Life Quotes

“Do you believe in God, Aunt Elner?” “Sure I do, honey, why?” “How old were you when you started believing, do you remember?” Aunt Elner paused for a moment. “I never thought about not believing. Never did question it. I guess believing is just like math: some people get it right out of the chute, and some have to struggle for it. (...) Oh, I know a lot of people struggle, wondering is there really a God. They sit and think and worry over it all their life. The good Lord had to make smart people but I don’t think he did them any favors because it seems the smart ones start questioning things from the get go. But I never did. I’m one of the lucky ones. I thank God every night, my brain is just perfect for me, not too dumb, not too bright. You know, your daddy was always asking questions.” “He was?” “I remember one day he said, ‘Aunt Elner, how do you know there is a God, how can you be sure?’ ” “What did you tell him?” “I said, ‘Well, Gene, the answer is right on the end of your fingertips.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, think about it. Every single human being that was ever born from the beginning of time has a completely different set of fingerprints. Not two alike. Not a single one out of all the billions is ever repeated.’ I said, ‘Who else but God could think up all those different patterns and keep coming up with new ones year after year, not to mention all the color combinations of all the fish and birds.’ ” Dena smiled. “What did he say?” “He said, ‘Yes, but, Aunt Elner, how do you know that God’s not repeating old fingerprints from way back and reusing them on us?’ ” She laughed. “See what I mean? Yes, God is great, all right. He only made one mistake but it was a big one.” “What was that?” “Free will. That was his one big blunder. He gave us a choice whether or not to be good or bad. He made us too independent … and you can’t tell people what to do; they won’t listen. You can tell them to be good until you’re blue in the face but people don’t want to be preached at except at church, where they know what they are getting and are prepared for it.” “What’s life all about, Aunt Elner? Don’t you ever wonder what the point of the whole thing is?” “No, not really; it seems to me we only have one big decision in this life, whether to be good or bad. That’s what I came up with a long time ago. Of course, I may be wrong, but I’m not going to spend any time worrying over it, I’m just going to have a good time while I’m here. Live and let live.”

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Book:Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!
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“With all the madness in the world, it is difficult to imagine what the point of everything is. When we grapple existential questions, we are left with no answers, but the futile acceptance that there is no meaning in life. When faced with existence, the question does not become a means to answer what should or could be done, but what would you do now that this situation is given in front of you?”

DeathSufferingPhilosophy Of LifeMeaning Of LifePurpose Of LifeDeath And Dying
Book:The Selficated Society: Why We Are Depressed in the Modern Age and How You Can Break Free from Suffering to Live a Life Worthwhile
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“...a key idea in Russian literature: the meaning of life can be revealed only to those who suffer. The happy can doze, the miserable must reflect. 'Suffering lays bare the real nature of things,' Evgeniya Ginzburg observed. 'It is the price to be paid for a deeper, more truthful understanding of life.' Suffering sometimes reveals higher meanings and, as Solzhenitsyn insisted, 'nothing worthwhile can be built on a neglect of higher meanings.”

SufferingMeaning Of Life
Book:Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
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“...horror reminds us of the utter hopelessness and meaninglessness of evil and suffering; when a child dies of cancer there is no “hidden” meaning, no cosmic plan that we have to wait for to be revealed one day that will make sense of this great suffering, rather, the death of any child is an utter disgrace, a meaningless void of pain that hurts every part of what it means to be human, and any attempt to frame such tragedy as part of God’s plan needs to be exorcised from all our thinking.”

TruthSufferingHopeHorrorMeaning Of Life
Book:Be Afraid: How Horror and Faith Can Change the World
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“I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing, And I look at flowers and I smile... I don’t know if they understand me Or if I understand them, But I know the truth is in them and in me And in our common divinity Of letting ourselves go and live on the Earth And carrying us in our arms through the contented Seasons And letting the wind sing us to sleep And not have dreams in our sleep.”

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Author:Alberto Caeiro
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“Resistance is dauntless audacity of the lesser against the greater through a will to suffering—the essential quality of existing—because suffering most clearly evinces the will-power of the sufferer. History is the story of ‘I’ as observed and evaluated by ‘me.’ When the history is written by my hands, I will fear nothing and live as if I am the history.”

InspirationSufferingExistenceResistanceMeaning Of LifeExistentialismIndividualismBeingWill Power
Book:On Resistism
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“An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize value is creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

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Book:Man's Search for Meaning
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“(...) can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects? After all, 'saying yes to life in spite of everything,' (...) presupposes that life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive. In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation.”

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Book:Man's Search for Meaning
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“To keep faith in mortal life, then, is to remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master. Mortality is not only intrinsic to what makes life meaningful, but also makes life susceptible to lose meaning and become unbearable. The point is not to overcome this vulnerability but to recognize that it is an essential part of why our lifes matter and why we care. (49)”

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Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others! He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs, And isn’t cured from the outside, Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink, Or a trunk not having iron bands! There being injustice is like there being death.”

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Book:The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
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“[I]t's difficult to make people see that what you have been taught counts for nothing, and that the only things worth having are the things you find out for yourself. Also, that when so many brands of what Chesterton calls 'fancy souls' and theories of life are offered you, there is no sense in not looking pretty carefully to see what you are going in for. [...] It isn't a case of 'Here is the Christian religion, the one authoritative and respectable rule of life. Take it or leave it'. It's 'Here's a muddling kind of affair called Life, and here are nineteen or twenty different explanations of it, all supported by people whose opinions are not to be sneezed at. Among them is the Christian religion in which you happpen to have been brought up. Your friend so-and-so has been brought up in quite a different way of thinking; is a perfectly splendid person and thoroughly happy. What are you going to do about it?' -- I'm worrying it out quietly, and whatever I get hold of will be valuable, because I've got it for myself; but really, you know, the whole question is not as simple as it looks.”

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Book:The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
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“Life is a ladder from the lowest to the highest. The majority of people live at the lowest rung, where we find ourselves at the time of birth. Many people think that just to be born is enough, so we go on living at the lowest rang for the whole of our life. Birth is just the beginning of a long journey, but the majority of people die at the same spot where they were born. They have not moved a single inch. They have just vegetated between birth and death. Their life energy has remained on the same plane.  It has not developed, it has not gone upwards. They are too occupied with their own small things, so they have no time to look upwards. Life really begins only when you start moving on the higher rungs of the ladder of life. Meditation is the only way to help you to move from the lower to the higher rungs of the ladder of life. Meditation means awareness. When you become aware of the body, you move beyond the body. Awareness means transcendence. When you become  aware  of the mind, you you have gone beyond the mind. And the moment that you have become aware of the heart. you have moved beyond the heart. The body, the mind and the heart are the most fundamental planes to become aware about.  When you have moved beyond these three planes, you have come to your real self. And only then does one know what life is all about. Then one comes to know the truth of life. One comes to know that meaning of life and the greatness of life.”

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Author:Swami Dhyan Giten
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“The equivalent of humans searching for their “real selves” is small cats chasing their tails. For it seems to me that there is no “real self”. We humans are ever-shifting, dynamic entities and not unchangeable, rigid selves. And even if there were a kind of centrum within us that we could call an “inner self”, we would never reach down to it, because of our natural biases about what we are and what our place in the world is. When we look in the mirror, we don’t see what we are, but we see what we want to be. Yet, as elusive as the search for self is, so clear is what we have to do on earth: to love and take care of each other. Life is too short and too miraculous to waste it on something other than love and joy!The equivalent of humans searching for their “real selves” is small cats chasing their tails. For I believe that there is no “real self”. We humans are ever-shifting, dynamic entities and not unchangeable, rigid selves. And even if there were a kind of centrum within us that we could call an “inner self”, we would never reach down to it, because of our natural biases about what we are and what our place in the world is. When we look in the mirror, we don’t see what we are, but we see what we want to be. Yet, as elusive as the search for self is, so clear is what we have to do on earth: to love and take care of each other. Life is too short and too miraculous to waste it on something other than love and joy!”

LoveSelfIdentitySelf AwarenessMeaning Of LifePurpose Of LifeBiasesReal SelfCare For Others
Author:Giannis Delimitsos
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“Everyone now and again wonders about those questions that have no ready answers: first cause, God's existence, what happens when the curtain goes down and nothing stops it, not kissing, not going to the mall, not the Super Bowl. "Wild roses," I said to them one morning. "Do you have the answers? And if you do, would you tell me?" The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us," they said. "But as you can see, we are just now entirely busy being roses.”

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Book:Felicity
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“Modern society has sent men on a quest that is perhaps an inquiry just as thought-provoking as the popular question: what is the meaning of life. The question thrown at men by the society is one which many men struggle to answer, and that question is: What does it mean to be a man?”

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Book:Alpha360: Book 1: An Evolutional Journey for the Modern Man
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“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. ~ Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense. ~ The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.”

GodBeautyAcceptanceMeaning Of LifeSurrender To GodOn Being
Book:The Essential Rumi (2020): Translations By Coleman Barks with John Moyne
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“We all have cracks and tears and shattered glass within our souls. Some have more than others. We do not wish to seek one who has none; but we wish to find the one who can say "look at me, look at this." We wish to find the one who sees every bit of broken glass and who will put those pieces into the palms of our hands and say "please keep them." And we wish to be that kind of person, too. This is how it should be.”

Inspirational QuotesInspirational LifeWisdom QuotesTrue LoveMeaning Of LifeInspirational LoveReal LoveLoving SomeoneBrokennessBeing TruthfulThe OneBeing BrokenFinding The One
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“People have all these opinions on what happens when we die and stand at the front gates of Heaven. People think we'll be asked if we were holy, if we were righteous, if we did good deeds. But I think we'll be asked if we loved a wild love, if we loved with all our soul, if we knew a love worth living for. Have you known a wild love? Have you told someone everything in your heart? That's what they'll ask us.”

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Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“If we were all looking for something 'easy come and easy go', then all of our lives would be easy. The problem is that we look for something real, don't we? And it is this longing for what is real, that makes finding the right person to be the most difficult task in the world. You can marry someone and promise the rest of your life to the person, only to find out later that this person makes you feel lonely. If we had no innate longing for true love and for true partnership, then none of us would have any problems! Therefore, the most frightening question to ponder upon, is, 'what if true love does not exist; what if the real stuff isn't real at all?' In such a case, life would be meaningless. I suppose I would rather believe in love relentlessly, than live in this world meaninglessly.”

LoveBelieveRelationshipsTrue LoveMeaning Of LifeReal LoveBelieve In LoveIs Love Real
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“Everything is in constant mutation, expanding and contracting. All we hear, see or think is a projection of our own…or someone else’s brain. We create our own realities. My reality is different from everyone else’s…and theirs is different to mine and to each other. We only perceive what we can sense, see, feel…believe and imagine. Knowledge is mostly borrowed. The world is set up that way…books, people, internet, movies, television, radio.”

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Author:Ana Rangel & Gerry O'malley
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“Science is great for us. But for someone who see the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is a just a one instant and younger than a baby.”

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Book:Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
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“Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is just a one instant and younger than a baby.”

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Book:Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
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“Science is great for us. But for someone who sees the humans for more than one million years, science is just a one instant like a baby trying to talk.”

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Book:Theories of Nature and the Universe: Comparison of Pure Buddhist Philosophy and Science
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“We all have gifts and talents. When we cultivate those gifts and share them with the world, we create a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts that we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don’t use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.”

PurposeTalentGiftWell BeingMeaning Of LifeBréne Brown
Book:The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown | Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review | Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
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