Yossi Ghinsberg Quotes

The way I'm seeing it, God has given me all this for me to realize that this isn't what I really need in my life.

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

Ya know, right now the most important thing in my life is to make sure you understand that, first of all I thank God I'm alive today, and I mean that. I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing.

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.

Most people appear to live an unexamined life, cruising through the years without much reflection about what it means, and/or taking what life hands them and believing it's all predestined.

If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.

You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life - so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content with yourself.

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?

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

I know how I want to try and live my life. I know I don't want to leave any darkness behind me.

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

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

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

I think there's something that happens at 40 where you settle into your own skin and you stop caring what people think - you realize life is a gift from God and you want to live it to the fullest.

At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

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

A part of me was like, 'Man, do I even like doing this anymore?' That whole thing of 'I'm in my 30s, and I sing and write songs while people are fighting wars in Iraq.' You know? So everything had to have more meaning, and it couldn't just be about making money. So, I took a minute.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

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

To me, I was just doing my job when I took the field, but to understand how close I came to death, I now realize what God has given me when he brought me into this world; he knew what he was doing.