The Meaning of Life Quotes

“A meaningful life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“These good narrators accept that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes are not dead ends; they are sources of information that can be exploited and put to work as guides to more effective subsequent action.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“We may go through a succession of failed relationships that leave us confused and hurt. But these experiences don’t have to be dismissed as meaningless. The wandering and the exploration may be intimately connected to our eventual development and growth. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. We cannot get anywhere important in one go. We must forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Different friends bring to the fore different sides of who we are: they influence us, encourage us and make us feel more at ease in varied ways. With one friend, we become more intellectual than usual; with another more adventurous, or more serious about politics, or more tender towards family. With a wide range of friends within reach, we are able to assemble and connect with the full, properly rounded, version of ourselves.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“What separates a good day from a bad one is not necessarily that we have been without stress or have returned home early. It is that we have derived a tangible impression of having made a difference to the lives of others. It turns out that it is simply not enough to make only ourselves happy.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“We love in part in the hope of being helped and redeemed by our lovers. There is an underlying desire for education and growth. We hope to change a little in their presence, becoming, through their help, better versions of ourselves. Just below the surface, love contains a hope for reparation and education. We usually think of education as something harsh imposed upon us against our will, but love promises to educate us in a more gentle and seductive way.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness, we will at last know that, in the arms of one extraordinary, patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Finally, good narrators appreciate that events can count as meaningful even when they aren’t recognised as such by powerful authorities in the world at large. We may be holidaying in a tent rather than in the Presidential suite, hanging out with our grandmother rather than a pop group, teaching children to read rather than buying and selling companies, and nevertheless lay claim to a legitimately meaningful life. We should not let false notions of prestige interfere with our attempts to focus on the aspects of our life stories that actually satisfy”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“These good narrators accept that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes are not dead ends; they are sources of information that can be exploited and put to work as guides to more effective subsequent action. The sound and fury can be made to yield hugely significant insights.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Only a small number of people ever self-consciously write their autobiographies. It is a task we associate with celebrities and the very old, but it is, in the background, a universal activity. We may not be publishing our stories, but we are writing them in our minds nevertheless. Every day finds us weaving a story about who we are, where we are going, and why events happened as they did.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“A decisive barrier to the more meaningful lives we seek is the half-formed, secret and deeply dangerous suspicion that we may be immortal.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“But, in truth, many ideas of normality are neither universal nor incontestable. It would be wholly possible to assemble large groups of impressive people who would take quite contrary views. In the company of 17th-century Dutch landscape painters, admiring grey clouds would be a prime virtue. If we lived around Balzac, Baudelaire or Proust, our apparently eccentric preferences for lying in bed thinking on weekends would be taken for granted.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Work gives us a chance, rare within the overall economy of our lives, to give precedence to our better natures.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“This is perhaps a definition of what all work can be when it goes well: a more elevated version of the person who created it.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Good families aren’t blind to our faults; they just don’t use these faults too harshly against us.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Every day finds us weaving a story about who we are, where we are going, and why events happened as they did.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“But when we come across the ideal book for us, we are presented with a clearer, more lucid, better-organised account of our own concerns and experiences.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“Through books’ benign simplification, we become a little better at being who we truly are.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“As the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) put it: ‘In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.’ Creative people don’t have thoughts fundamentally different from ours; they just don’t neglect them as readily.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment

“To wonder too openly, or intensely, about the meaning of life sounds like a peculiar, ill-fated and unintentionally comedic pastime.”
― The School of Life, The Meaning of Life: The true ingredients of fulfilment