Discovering Meaning Quotes

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

You will need to find your passion. Don't give up on finding it because then all you're doing is waiting for the Reaper.

My trouble is I'm the sort of writer who only finds out what he's getting at by the time he's got to the end of it.

If you can find a passion at a young age, somewhere between fifteen and thirty, if you can find that passion, I can pretty much guarantee you that you can be sixty-five and still love that passion and still have a reason to dance out of bed and down the hall every morning.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

Everyone needs a hobby, he said. And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave.