Life Means Quotes

...I owed her a debt of gratitude. More than gratitude, much more.
I could finally see what had always been there. She had been more than an attendant, more than a friend, more than a sister. She had been a mother to me. She had worried, sought to protect me from danger, guided me toward the best. She had looked out for my future, assessed the worthiness of everyone to be in my life. And in that way, she had taken me as her purpose in life, the one who gave her meaning. I had a constant love all along. And in recognizing that, I felt moved to tears.
"How could you step out of my life?" I told her. "if you do don't join me, I will be lost. No one would worry about me as much as you. No one knows me better, knows my past and what this new life means. I should have told you a long time ago." I became teary-eyed. She kept her lips sealed, but her jaw was trembling. "You are the only loyal person in my life, the only one I can trust."
Tears fell from her eyes. "Now you know. I was always the only one."
"We love each other," I said with a light laugh. "In spite of all the trouble I've given you, you stayed with me. So it must be that you loved me like a mother. ~ Amy Tan

Science can't tell us what our life means ethically. It can't tell us what we are meant to do as moral creatures. But, insofar as science can understand what we're made of, and what we're related to, the Darwinian revolution completely revised our ideas about who we are and what we're related to and how long we've been here and why we're on this Earth. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making
trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Everybody knows how awful the world is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things, others with sports, money, love, art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way. ~ Woody Allen

In the Light of interbeing, peace and happiness in your daily life means peace and happiness in the world. ~ Nhat Hanh

...don't simplify your life so you can do more. Simplify your life so you can focus on what matters - and you are what matters. Simplifying your life means focusing on who you are physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you want to choose joy daily, that's the place to start. ~ Kay Warren

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life. ~ Robert Penn Warren

This is your life!" Jared shouted.
"That's right!" Kami shouted back at him. "It's my life! I get to decide what to do with it! Don't you dare act like my life means more to you than it does to me! ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

People wonder why there seems to be no meaning in life. Meaning does not exist a priori. There is no meaning existing in life; one has to create it. Only if you create it will you discover it. It has to be invented first. It is not lying there like a rock, it has to be created like a song. It is not a thing, it is significance that you bring through your consciousness. ~ Rajneesh

Being a winner in life means finding a way to keep yourself in the personal space where you're being the best and most vibrant you instead of the smallest you. That is the secret to success in anything you want to do in life. That means not comparing yourself to anyone else and concentrating on you. Because when your self-esteem is in the shitter and you don't feel worthy, you look to others for validation, you settle for crappy things and all you get is crappy things and who wants that? ~ Greg Behrendt

Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have – and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life. ~ Philip Appleman

I wanted to tell him to wake up before it was too late, but I no longer feel a responsibility to people who are so willing to die having done nothing they wanted to do, having lived for others who never cared any way, muddling along, waiting for a grave to open. My life means infinitely more to me than that. I decided to do what I want, to follow my beliefs no matter what it takes or what I must suffer, lose, abandon. Today I became more of that Xavier persona than ever before. I felt so confident in my self, so self-assured that I didn't care whether those listening to me thought I was crazy, because to me, living in illusions is crazy, staying alive just to eat, screw and work is crazy. I am the sane one, the way I see it now. They asked me what I believed. I said, 'I believe that I can do anything, that I am a product of all that I have thought, that I create my reality and am constantly exploring for ways to make radical changes in my life, by the use of my mind, my behavior -- my actions.' I just gave them a little taste, but they didn't look at me with the look of 'this guy is crazy.' they seemed to be astounded that I would say those things aloud. ~ Mike Darigan

The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him - the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent. ~ Virginia Woolf

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure. ~ Alice Foote MacDougall

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. ~ Kevin DeYoung

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me. ~ Minor White

The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect. ~ D.T. Suzuki

... what your life means depends on how you tell the story. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means. ~ Oliver Sacks

One prays for life , life means free choice and freedom is mystery . If one knew the truth how could there be freedom ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

For some reason, I never felt the need to have kids. My wife feels the same. We don't feel a void. I don't think they would give my life meaning. I do think of the books as my children, though. Whatever is inside of me, I put into my books. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what "making sense out of life" means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux. ~ Alan W. Watts

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos. ~ John Dewey

The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation, Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery. ~ Saul Bellow

Hope is life's essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning. ~ Dick Van Dyke

I've never written a book with the intention of winning someone back or getting back at someone or anything like that. It's always just been about thinking about life and how relationships fit in to what life means. ~ Jeffrey Brown

To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible. ~ Moby

Give life meaning through your commitments. ~ Paul C. Reinert

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me ... ~ Lucy Larcom

If your life means nothing to anyone, it does mean a lot to you and that's what is important. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Often, warriors find their lives meaningless. ~ Paulo Coelho

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
Love is a friendship set to music. ~ Joseph Campbell

" ... Grateful living makes life meaningful and full of joy." ~ David Steindl-Rast

My life carries its own meaning in itself. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Interest in religion is not necessarily interest in God. Religion in public life means a set of ideas, an ideology that has certain positions. Religion is then one more ideology among others. Religion is about God. Religion begins with a relationship to God, not a relationship to an idea. It is God who is an actor, not just individuals who have certain beliefs who are actors. God is an actor. ~ Francis George

Growing up in your life means constantly getting yourself out of your comfort zone. ~ Nitin Namdeo

You must know that you are always near to everything! Nothing is far from you! Life means to be close to everything, to be close to death, to smile, to hot, to cold, to joy, to sorrow! We live in a very small island surrounded by everything, surrounded by good, by bad, by sweet, by bitter! We are very close to everything! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Life is not somewhere waiting for you, it is happening in you. It is not in the future as a goal to be arrived at, it is herenow, this very moment - in your breathing, circulating in your blood, beating in your heart. Whatsoever you are is your life, and if you start seeking meaning somewhere else, you will miss it. Man has done that for centuries. ~ Rajneesh

If you experience any emotion like frustration, hesitation or anger, while planning your dream life , means you need to clear some mental blocks. ~ Hina Hashmi

No person can claim to be anything more or anything less than his or her individual assimilation of a lifelong symposium of inimitable physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual occurrences. Simply put, we each place our own individualized stamp upon the meaning of life. How we live, how we struggle, and how we die reflects what life means to each of us. We are all students of life, we are a product of what we pay attention to, what we observe, and experience, and what subjects arrest our minds. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Who am I? What should I do in life? What is the meaning of life? Humans have been asking these questions from time immemorial. Every generation needs a new answer, because what we know and don't know keeps changing. Given everything we know and don't know about science, about God, about politics and about religion – what is the best answer we can give today?
What kind of an answer do people expect? In almost all cases, when people ask about the meaning of life, they expect to be told a story. Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal, that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings. When we look for the meaning of life, we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what is my particular role in the cosmic drama. This role defines who I am, and gives meaning to all my experiences and choices.
One popular story, told for thousands of years to billions of anxious humans, explains that we are all part of an eternal cycle that encompasses and connects all beings. Each being has a distinctive function to fulfil in the cycle. To understand the meaning of life means to understand your unique function, and to live a good life means to accomplish that function. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Cooperate expression of your church life means a lot ~ Sunday Adelaja

What life means, it came to him (or he seemed to overhear it), it means all the time, not just at isolated dramatic moments that never happened. If life means anything at all, it means whatever it means every hour, every minute, through any episode big or small, if only one has the awareness to sense it … each step, the dramatic and the humdrum alike - every fleeting second of the way. ~ Leslie Jamison

For people in thrall to 'mortality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing about alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. ~ John Gray

His plan in your life means his work in your hands, and you can be sure it is work he has chosen and gifted you to do. ~ Jill Briscoe

Life is a self-correcting, negative regulatory system because it is always moving toward a specific target destination in the future. This target destination we call 'self preservation'.

Achieve this goal it must constantly reduce the probabilities that interfere with its movement toward that future target.

Hence, it conserves by self-regulating, like a thermostat set at a specific temperature, as it advances, all the while seeking to re-adapt in accordance with the changes it incurs.

Putting this principle to work in our daily life means learning to adapt to new information while always adhering to a basic plan that can, in general, be modified according to alterations in the data encountered.

Thoughts from; SPIRAL FORECASTING: Nature's Inside Track to Future Success ~ Nahu Lanham

Living the Christian life means striving for holiness. ~ Billy Graham

Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things that we don't want. Our marriage isn't working; our job isn't coming together. Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out. ~ Pema Chodron

Saving a life isn't just pulling a friend from the fire," he explains, the daredevil playing in his wet,
excited eyes. "It's thereafter keeping him from the fire. Saving a life means saving it over and over. ~ Daryl Banner

Distance means so little, when life means so much. ~ Amit Kalantri

The Christian life means putting off the character of the world and putting on the character of Christ. ~ Jim George

Let us never lose sight of the fact that education is a preparation for life - and that preparing for life is far more than knowing how to make a living or how to land on the moon. Preparing for life means building personal integrity, developing a sound sense of values, increasing the capacity and willingness to serve. Education must have its roots in moral principles. If we lose sight of that fact in our attempt to match our educational system against that of the materialists, we shall have lost far more than we could possibly gain. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Consecrated life means going to the very root of the love of Jesus Christ with an undivided heart and putting nothing ahead of this love. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

My mind mellows now, and I sit back, glad to be done with a busy day. Evening's tranquility presents a chance to settle in with myself and with You. It is the time of day that I most often reflect on who I am and what my life means. ~ Hope Lyda

I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise.
Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. ~ Susanna Kaysen

When you die, do you want to feel ashamed of what you've done with your life? Feel ashamed of what your life meant? ~ Jim Butcher

Life means nothing to you, at least that's what they say. But it doesn't mean that you have the right to take life away. ~ Ray Davies

Friends, companions, lovers, are those who treat us in terms of our unlimited worth to ourselves. They are closest to us who best understand what life means to us, who feel for us as we feel for ourselves, who are bound to us in triumph and disaster, who break the spell of our loneliness. ~ Henry Alonso Myers

A sportswriter's life means never sitting with your wife or family at the games. Still working after everyone has gone to the party ... Digging beneath a coach's lies, not to forget those of athletic directors and general managers and owners of pro teams. Keeping a confidence. Risking it. ~ Dan Jenkins

The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and Tightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow-men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that's is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything … the way … the Tao.

The way of life! A grand expression. Like saying Truth. There is nothing beyond it … it is all.

And so the analyst says Adapt yourself! He does not mean, as some wish to think - adapt yourself to this rotten state of affairs! He means: adapt yourself to life! Become an adept! That is the highest adjustment - to make oneself an adept. ~ Henry Miller

Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose - to be in relationship to God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means. ~ Francis Schaeffer

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps ~ Bob Black

To me, living a rich life means focusing on the minutiae, the seemingly small, insignificant moments that can pass us by if we don't watch carefully. They're the quiet, chilly morning walks with my [dog]; the adventure of going for a bike ride in a new part of town; cooking a dinner alongside my boyfriend; or even the simple activity of crimping a pie crust. These moments don't require much, just a little planning and attention. ~ Adrianna Adarme

For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment - that's where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live - that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life.

To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When I look at my family, that's all life means, right there. ~ Terry Crews

A worthy life involves loving as loved folks do, sharing the ridiculous mercy God spoiled us with first. (It really is ridiculous.) It means restoring people, in ordinary conversations and regular encounters. A worthy life means showing up when showing up is the only thing to do. ~ Jen Hatmaker

The worldly life means a market place of sensual pleasures. Worldly life means false (temporary) happiness all the time. And moksha (liberation) means permanent happiness all the time. ~ Dada Bhagwan

If you want to understand what a year of life means, ask a student who just flunked his end-of-the-year exams. Or a month of life: speak to a mother who has just given birth to a premature baby and is waiting for him to be taken out of the incubator before she can hold him safe and sound in her arms. Or a week: interview a man who works in a factory or a mine to feed his family. Or a day: ask two people madly in love who are waiting for their next rendezvous. Or an hour: talk to a claustrophobia sufferer stuck in a broken-down elevator. Or a second: look at the expression on the face of a man who has just escaped from a car wreck. Or one-thousandth of a second: ask the athlete who just won the silver medal at the Olympic Games, and not the gold he trained for all his life. Life is magic, Arthur, and I know what I'm saying because since my accident I appreciate the value of every instant. So I beg you, let's make the most of all the seconds that we have left. ~ Marc Levy

To be practical in life means to take everything seriously and nothing tragically. ~ Arthur Schnitzler

To understand at all what life means, one must begin with Christian belief. And I think knowledge may be sorrow with a man unless he loves. ~ William Mountford

Today, elderly people are discarded when, in reality, they are the seat of wisdom of the society ... the right to life means allowing people to live and not killing, allowing them to grow, to eat, to be educated, to be healed, and to be permitted to die with dignity. ~ Pope Francis

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

To have divine favor on your life means you'll attract extraordinary opposition ~ Bill Johnson

But if you know that you've got to be somewhere in half an hour, there's no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There's not always a lot of time for other things. ~ David Lynch

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Man's right to life means his right to have the free and unrestricted use of all the things which may be necessary to his fullest mental, spiritual, and physical unfoldment or, in other words, his right to be rich. ~ Wallace D. Wattles

Life means work, and hard work, if you mean to succeed. ~ Lady Randolph Churchill

Relationships keep us alive and our lives meaningful. ~ Bernie Siegel

Look at all the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart- and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. The king was the country; how could he possibly expect it go into battle without him? But now... Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he's started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousand for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means nothing; human life means nothing. We're ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go. ~ Tana French

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live. ~ Robert Browning

Torkie Macleod has always regarded himself as a realist. He doesn't believe in life after death or divine reward or resurrection. He doesn't even believe in leaving a legacy, insofar as anything of that nature, good or bad, is completely insignificant to the one who is dead. Torkie's pragmatic philosophy has always been to make the most of his limited time alive, which for him means not striving for fame or riches, not ticking off a list of famous destinations, not indulging in any death-defying feats, and certainly not raising a family to "carry on his name." to Torkie Macleod, realist, life means making decent money with limited effort, hanging around with cool people, not being bossed around by anyone, and ingesting any mind-altering substance he chooses without a scintilla of shame or regret. ~ Anthony O'Neill

There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on forever. ~ Jonathan Maberry

A better everyday life means getting away from status and conventions
being freer and more at ease as human beings. ~ Ingvar Kamprad

A worthy life means showing up when showing up is the only thing to do. Goodness bears itself out in millions of ordinary ways across the globe, for the rich and poor, the famous and unknown, in enormous measures and tiny, holy moments. It may involve a career and it may not. It may include traditional components and it may not. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Allowing the truth of who you are-your spiritual self-to rule your life means you stop the struggle and learn to move with the flow of your life. ~ Oprah Winfrey

No one gets to tell you what your life means! ~ Jess Walter

Theere is an imperative to be in a process, the energy & consciousness of life means for us to be constantly observing, learning & becoming. ~ Jay Woodman

That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it. ~ John Burnside

It is hope that gives life meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks better. ~ Francois Jacob

I take a less gloomy view. A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying. I stopped trying, but my life was so full of strenuous routines that I wouldn't have noticed had it been not for my disease. My whole professional life was a diseased and grandiose attack on my humanity. It is an achievement to know that I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man? ~ Alasdair Gray

Life means to be living.Problems will always be there. When they arise navigate through them with yoga- don't take a break. ~ B.K.S. Iyengar

Vulnerability is the only authentic state. Being vulnerable means being open, for wounding, but also for pleasure. Being open to the wounds of life means also being open to the bounty and beauty. Don't mask or deny your vulnerability: it is your greatest asset. Be vulnerable: quake and shake in your boots with it. the new goodness that is coming to you, in the form of people, situations, and things can only come to you when you are vulnerable, i.e. open. ~ Stephen Russell

You just decide what your values are in life and what you are going to do, and then you feel like you count, and that makes life worth living. It makes my life meaningful. ~ Annie Lennox

You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! ~ Jane Addams

Making Life means making trouble ~ George Bernard Shaw

In order to align your life choices with your values, you will need to inquire about the effects of your actions (and inactions) on yourself and others. Although we are always stumbling upon new knowledge that shifts our choices and life direction, bringing conscious inquiry to life means that we continually ask questions that lead us to the information we need to make thoughtful decisions. Asking questions is liberating because we develop great understanding and discover more choices with our new knowledge. ~ Zoe Weil

I think because I became a mom later in life, everything in life means more. ~ Mariska Hargitay

Life means Live in faith existence. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Having a home means having somewhere to go back to. Having a family means having someone to defend. Having a life means knowing you'll do anything to keep it. ~ Mira Grant