#meaning

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Art is the proper task of life.

Without death, life would be like a book whose pages are endless, and therefore meaningless.

We do not need to invent meaning; we are meaning. Every leaf, every bug, every cloud is an answer to a question no one needed to ask.

When you listen to the birds singing, do you ask what they mean? The song of the bird is its own meaning.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

Every life is a story, whether it is written down or not.

The most vital need of the modern soul is for a sense of meaning.

Without meaning, the life of man is an unendurable torment.

Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Meaning must be found and cannot be given; it cannot be invented, it must be discovered.

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Human existence cannot be meaningless. As long as we have breath, as long as we are conscious, we are responsible to answer the demands of reality.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

Despair is suffering without meaning.

The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.

We do not invent the meaning of our life; we detect it.