Norman Maclean Quotes

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

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

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

The meaning of life is life.

When I was younger, I was looking for this magic meaning of life.

I have a calling in my soul, if you like, to try to make my life in some way worthwhile. What is the value of my existence?

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

I find daily life not always joyous, but always interesting. I have some sad days and nights, but none that are dull. As I advance deeper into the vale of years, I live with constantly increasing gusto and excitement. I am sure it all means something; in the last analysis, I am an optimist because I believe in God. Those who have no faith are quite naturally pessimists and I do not blame them.

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

There is a lot more to this life than just the struggle to make money.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

There is also purpose in 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.

The meaning of our lives is revealed through experiences that at first seem at odds with each other--moments we wish would never end and moments we wish had never begun.

The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won't make a life meaningful either.

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.

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

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

We must know that we have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.