Top 74 Quotes About The Search For Meaning
#1. The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely.
Irvin D. Yalom
#2. The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
#3. But there is a second answer to the question of why greatness, one that is at the very heart of what motivated us to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work. I
James C. Collins
#4. Most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning.
John Green
#5. The overall theme of theology can be twofold: the search for meaning and the responsibility one has to the others.
Namsoon Kang
#6. What is [the role of money] in the search for meaning? Is our relationship to it one of the chief factors that keeps us in our prison, or could it also be a tool for breaking out, for awakening to a life filled with intensity of purpose?
Jacob Needleman
#7. One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.
Anne Lamott
#8. It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.
Ricky Williams
#9. We sin from a place of emptiness. We sin from a place of wanting to be filled up. The search for meaning drives many of our decisions, and ultimately it's the driving factor in our search for breathing room.
Josh Reich
#10. The search for meaning is really the search for the lost chord. When the lost chord is discovered by humankind, the discord in the world will be healed and the symphony of the universe will come into complete harmony with itself.
John O'Donohue
#11. The search for meaning is an illusion of logic and a requirement of the middleclass for predictable breeding space.
Christopher S. Hyatt
#12. The search for meaning was the cornerstone of human disquiet
Blake Crouch
#13. On Philosophy:
It's the search for meaning that has value, not the meaning itself.
All problems are solvable if a problem is a question that can't be shown not to have a solution.
To those with burning passion, follow it; to those of lessor passion, fill a need.
Kalifer Deil
#14. Till the time, you are enjoying the outside process, everything seems alright, but when the query arises, about why life, you search for the deeper meaning with life.
Roshan Sharma
#15. The task is not to search for meaning, but to bring meaning to every situation you are in.
Alberto Villoldo
#17. I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful.
Kim Novak
#18. The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The name I'd like to give to the kind of relationship that gives us a chance to find such things is a 'circle of meaning.'
Brendan Myers
#19. It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
#20. Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#21. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life ... Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life ... second, by what we take from the world ... third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change ...
Viktor E. Frankl
#22. Reward systems, such as those mediated by dopamine, also destabilize during adolescence in order to allow for the creation of new attachments, behaviors, and goals. This search for purpose and meaning makes adolescents more vulnerable to good and bad social influences,
Louis Cozolino
#23. Love is the fundamental building block of all human relationships. It will greatly impact our values and morals. Love is the important ingredient in one's search for meaning.
Gary Chapman
#24. If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.
Mae West
#25. Peace does not walk up to our doorsteps and press the calling bell! We have to go out there and search for it.
Avijeet Das
#26. To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.
T. S. Eliot
#27. You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus
#28. Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself," he said. "Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe." From a Life Magazine interview in 1988.
Julian Jaynes
#29. The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
Viktor E. Frankl
#30. Search for truth, not for meaning. Meaning comes from the perspective of a person who interprets the truth.
J.R. Rim
#31. Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.
Norman Lock
#32. Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.
Eduardo Paes
#33. So we should not try to grasp all the signs at once. Instead, we should strive to open ourselves to the signs, take note of them when they appear, and search our imagination for their possible meaning. This is more an intuitive than a rational process.
Yoav Ben-Dov
#34. [Your] search for meaning in the world ... can only really be fulfilled by the greater purpose that has sent [you] here in the first place.
The New Message From God
#35. Search for love, for it is the most important ingredient of life. Without it, you life will echo emptiness. With it, your life will vibrate with warmth and meaning. Even during any hardship, love will shine through.
Nikita Koloff
#36. Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.
Saul D. Alinsky
#37. God is the inevitability of humanity's search for true meaning.
Jared Brock
#38. God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books.
Khalil Gibran
#39. Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively.
Stella Adler
#40. The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.
Marilyn Ferguson
#41. A philosophy which no longer asks the question of the meaning of life would be in great danger of reducing the merely accessory functions, with no real passion for the search for truth.
Pope John Paul II
#42. Everyone seeks for love as you do, but knows it not unless he joins with you in seeking it. If you undertake the search together, you bring with you a light so powerful that what you see is given meaning.
Foundation For Inner Peace
#43. Sometimes the best course in the search for the meaning of life is to busy yourself until you forget that you don't know the meaning of life
Amanda Hocking
#44. She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.
Gary Shteyngart
#45. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.
Radka Donnell
#46. Thou art but a feeble flower in the garden of the universe, yet thou hath a purpose much greater than thyself.
Raneem Kayyali
#47. Why in the world have we never found what we're really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won't accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#48. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker,
Shepard Fairey
#49. Once an individual's search for meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering
Viktor E. Frankl
#50. By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
#51. Man's search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
Viktor E. Frankl
#52. Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric Hoffer
#53. There are those who insist that it is a very bad thing to question God. To them, "why?" is a rude question. That depends, I believe, on whether it is an honest search, in faith, for His meaning, or whether it is the challenge of unbelief and rebellion.
Elisabeth Elliot
#54. No matter how you really feel at the moment or what is happening in your life, resolve to remain cheerful and upbeat. As Viktor Frankl wrote in his bestselling book Man's Search for Meaning, The last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one's attitude in any given set of cricumstances.
Brian Tracy
#55. In the search for reality, energy creates its own discipline. But mere discipline, without full comprehension of all this, has no meaning, it is a most destructive thing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#56. A friend of mine once told me 'For people like us, the meaning is the search for the meaning.
Janis Ian
#57. What we're searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#58. She had stumbled on what was possibly the ultimate truth, the greatest wisdom of all - the search for knowledge never ends. It goes on and on forever.
Michael Oehley
#59. the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, he wrote about how he survived a Nazi concentration camp by creating a Why every day: a reason to live, to try - a reason not to give up. It would have been much easier to give up, Frankl noted, and most did.
Robert J. Langone
#60. Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#61. When one begins to purposefully perform acts of kindness, the spirit changes and soon doing good deeds becomes a focal point for our life; doing good begins to be the same as feeling good. The periods of emptiness when we search for the "meaning of it all" begin to fill with acts of kindness.
Gary Blair
#62. Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
Viktor E. Frankl
#63. At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
Viktor E. Frankl
#64. The only Sundance [2011] film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, THE WOODS has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.
Karina Longworth
#66. Thinking ... is a soundless dialogue, it is the weaving of patterns, it is a search for meaning. The activity of thought contributes to and shapes all that is specifically human.
Vera John-Steiner
#67. The meaning of the Street in all ways and at all times is the need for sharing life with others and the search for community.
Virginia Hamilton
#68. What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?
John Gardner
#69. In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel's secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart.
Orhan Pamuk
#70. More young people are volunteering than ever before. More people are including service to others on their busy lives' to do list. The promise of America is embedded deep in our DNA, calling us to a much less shallow search for happiness and meaning.
Arianna Huffington
#71. The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.
Barbara Hepworth
#72. A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive.
Gloria Steinem
#73. Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.
Viktor E. Frankl
#74. I'm at a crossroads. I believe I only have one chance to pick the proper direction.
Destin Bays
