Quotes about Meaning

There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

Mere duration of existence doesn't make that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance.

If God does not exist, our lives are ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless despite how desperately we cling to the illusion to the contrary.

As the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre observed, several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends that life has meaning.