Life's Questions Quotes

There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.

Life is a question without a standard answer.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

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

I don't know how, where, and why the idea for 'Defending Your Life' began; the idea had been bouncing around for a while. Stories like that sort of have to bounce. They don't come out of nowhere. I went through my own period of life with sort of everything turning upside down, and wondering, 'Why is it this way?'

I stopped asking myself questions like what the value of my stock was and started asking more fundamental questions of life and death.

I'm curious about life, period.

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

To wonder about life is not something we learn; it is something we forget.

Maybe I am looking for the reason why I exist.

We come. We go. And in between we try to understand.

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

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.

How we come to be, and how we are what we are, is beyond any understanding. I have been obsessed by this, trying to understand the very nature of my existence.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?

We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.

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.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

Acting, for me, is not an end in itself. It's more a means to asking the questions I'm obsessed with about life.