Pursuit of Meaning Quotes

Everyone chooses one of two roads in life - the old and the young, the rich and the poor, men and women alike. One is the broad, well-traveled road to mediocrity, the other road to greatness and meaning.

The pursuit of meaning, not happiness, is what makes life worthwhile.

It would be fantastic to spend your whole life trying to pursue something and then finally, at the last moment, you achieve it. You know, instead of getting it in the middle of the pursuit and spending the second half giving it meaning.

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

The moment one is on the side of life; peace and security drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.

Looking for the perfect day is not going to make us happy, because that day isn't going to come.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

You can't want to be happy, because that's too easy and too boring.

Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves

I know it sounds old-fashioned to say we're too materialistic in the West, but happiness does not derive exclusively from things, and yet we seem to be structuring our whole society around things. I think that's partially why Westerners are joining ISIS and going to Syria. We have lost our way in the West in holding up a vision for humanity that is not exclusively shaped by materialism.

Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ...man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.