"If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."
— Bill Watterson

"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run - in the long-run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it"
— Viktor E. Frankl

"Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all."
— Patricia A. McKillip (In The Forests of Serre)

"It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks."
— Wendy Mass (Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life)

"There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed."
— Max Barry (Company)

"But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words."
— Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South)

"Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?"
— K-Ske Hasegawa (Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1)

"To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid."
— Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology)

"All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."
— Malaclypse the Younger (Principia Discordia, Or, How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger)

"If the universe has no meaning, then we never should have found out it had no meaning."
— C.S. Lewis

"Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning."
— Paulo Coelho (The Pilgrimage)

"If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?"
— Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)

"Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”"
— R. Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)

"We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight)

"Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history."
— Nikolai Berdyaev

"On the wall next to the table, next to the scones that provided each table with its own circle of lamplight were quotations about reading, her favorite of which was from Kafka: 'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.'"
— Haven Kimmel (The Solace of Leaving Early)

"MDMA, it was beginning to be apparent, could be all things to all people."
— Alexander Shulgin (Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story)

"Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives."
— Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

"Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference."
— Robert Coles (The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination)

"Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."
— Viktor E. Frankl

"I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now."
— George Eliot

"-Can we have one day when we don't have to talk about the meaning of life?
-I don't think we ever talk about anything else."
— Lily King (The English Teacher)

""If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.""
— Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward: 2000-1887)

"Masculine and feminine stories cannot have the same ending."
— Milorad Pavic (Dictionary of the Khazars)

"He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how"
— Viktor Frankl

"There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.
"
— John H. Groberg (The Other Side of Heaven)

"On the Bigotry of Culture:
: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing."
— José Ortega y Gasset (The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature)

"The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. "
— Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)

"The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."
— Chris Hedges (War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning)

"Why do you so earnestly seek
the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the
bottom of your own heart."
— Ryokan

"Listen to whatI mean, not what I say. Duh!"
— John Porter

"...that, to repeat what I heard for years and years and suspect you’ve been hearing over and over, yourself, something’s meaning is nothing more or less than its function. Et cetera et cetera et cetera. Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? What does she use now? No. What she did with me--I must have been eight, or twleve, who remembers--was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, ’Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of the domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No? What now, then? With pencils? No matter. Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as fundamentalness."
— David Foster Wallace (The Broom of the System)

"Just living is not enough... One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."
— Hans Christian Anderson

"To return to the root
Is to find the meaning,
But to pursue appearances
Is to miss the source. "
— Seng Ts'an

"Don't sign your name
between worlds,

surmount
the manifold of meanings,

trust the tearstain,
learn to live."
— Paul Celan (Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan)

"I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?"
— Octavio Paz