Emma Thompson Quotes

I am not one to seek simple causes.

They place great stress on the clarity of our language for expressing nuances and showing subtleties.

Nothing bigger can come to a human being than to love a great cause more than life itself.

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.

To find a cause that's larger than yourself and then to give your life to it.

I think everything in life happens for a reason. I always think there's room for me to improve as a person.

No one gets to tell you what your life means!

You must keep a careful, correct perspective on life that this is not about me but about me serving my gift to the world.

The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.

If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.

. . . the weal of the race, and the cause of humanity, here and now, are enough To give life meaning and death as well.

If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.

Life wants you to serve something more than yourself. When you serve something more than yourself, you are served. It's the most ironic thing in the world.

Nothing would mean anything if I didn't live a life of use to others.

Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

A lot can be told from what happens in between the main moments.

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

People wonder why there seems to be no meaning in life. Meaning does not exist a priori. There is no meaning existing in life; one has to create it. Only if you create it will you discover it. It has to be invented first. It is not lying there like a rock, it has to be created like a song. It is not a thing, it is significance that you bring through your consciousness.

Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil's there, too-everyone says so-but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be you know.

The important point is to not just follow your passion but something larger than yourself.

Life isn't worth living until you have found something worth dying for.

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.

I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be - that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.