Win Butler Quotes

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

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

It seems essential to try to find some meaning to life and I guess Jungian philosophy is the one that's helped me understand myself and the world more than anything else.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

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

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

… one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

Trying to work out where you find meaning and sense in a meaningless world is my obsession.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That’s because we typically begin at the wrong starting point—ourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life’s purpose.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

Humans have always wondered the big questions, "Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?" It's part of human nature. It's perhaps the underpinnings of religion.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

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

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?'

Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.