A Significant Life Quotes

“For a human life to be meaningful, it must be one in which I am not a spectator but a real participant, and a participant in something that matters to me. [...] For my life to be meaningful, those projects have to feel like _my_ projects: not in the sense that I own them, but more in the sense that they own me, that they have captured my focus.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“for Aristotle contemplation is the highest good that a life can achieve. It is the good he associates with the gods.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“Is there some reason for my being here except to live out my allotted time, to burn my days alongside others who are, in turn, burning theirs?”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“In 1998, the New York Times reported that “in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy.”4”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“In 1998, the New York Times reported that “in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“Thomas Kuhn, who once said that he came to realize that he did not understand a thinker until he could see the world through that thinker’s eyes.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“The absurd itself is something very precise. It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“...narrative therapy says that who we are is largely a product of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. [...] In other words, our narratives about ourselves don't merely reflect who we are: they help produce who we are.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe