James Thurber Quotes

I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result.

It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.

We all have a cradle-to-the-grave journey to make and, in between, what do you do? There's got to be something hereafter.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result. I think it's kinda the process and I think that if you can find happiness in the process then maybe that's it.

They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

We must have a theme, a goal, a purpose in our lives. If you don't know where you're aiming, you don't have a goal. My goal is to live my life in such a way that when I die, someone can say, she cared.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

Mortal experiences give us the opportunity to assess what we are doing with our lives.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

Life is our dictionary.

Basically, I feel fortunate to have realized what the goal is in life. There's no point in dying having gone through your life without knowing who you are, what you are, or what the purpose of life is. And that's all it is.

I'm just interested in carving out a meaningful life.

I wrote the book because I wanted to be able to share some things that I had learned and as pompous as that may sound, as you get to a certain point in life, you figure so what am I doing?

I always figure from the cradle to the grave, we all have our individual journeys, and maybe my journey was a positive one and I accomplished certain things without stepping on too many toes.

The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.

Like my mother, I was always saying, 'I'll fix my life one day.' It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The hallway of every man's life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

If you've done what you need to do, you need to go bury yourself, because what else are you going to do? I think that that's where life stops.

Everything is an experience. You learn something different from everything you do.

The business of living - that's your artwork, and the process of that is finding out who you are, what it all means.