Terry Eagleton Quotes

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

I got married before I found myself. People should find themselves before they get married.

Young people are often asked, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' and given advice about how to lead meaningful adult lives, but where's the encouragement to lead meaningful lives right now?

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

I think that's one of the things that's missing in a lot of people's lives. That's finding out what works for you and doing that.

I can't imagine, as a human being, not being able to grow.

It just seemed hedonistic when I first started acting. It was a pleasurable thing. But as I look back on it now, I understand that it was a journey of the self for me.

Every person can reach a full life.

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.

I like this idea of becoming fully realised.

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

Everybody grows in their own way.

One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is.

You don't find out who you are unless you work at it.

Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

On some level, I think we want our reading self to represent our best self.

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.