existential quest Quotes

For me, God is in my life. I don't hide from that... I think the search has been on since the '60s.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

The longest journey is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest for the source of his being.

He was always striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.

Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives? So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

God puts certain things in certain people. I'm a restless soul. I'm always searching. I'm always pressing to find what truth is and what life is all about.

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It's like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it.

When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way to ourselves.

I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.

I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

I think it's about time we gave up religion and got back to God.

I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.'

I'm just a simple man trying to make his way in the universe.

I was trying to figure out where my intellect, if I really have one, where it fit. And so I was searching. I really didn't know who I was or what I really wanted to be, and in that search, like I think you do as an actor, you end up trying to define whatever that is, and I sort of said, "Oh well, searching spiritually in a way is interesting, and Eastern religion seems to be about a search."

There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers after the Truth-have you ever heard of a permanent one?

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

I wanted to do something that gave my life meaning and purpose.

Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

I see myself as a man who is searching for meaning in life. This is rather different from being a staunch believer in something. A believer is someone who senses a consciousness or a direction and believes in it. The one who searches for meaning has not found the direction yet.