A Quote by Hubert Selby, Jr.

We all need a meaning to our life.

Hubert Selby, Jr.

Quote Topics

Life Meaning Need Our

Quote Author

Hubert Selby, Jr.
American - Writer
July 23, 1928 - April 26, 2004

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

Eric Hoffer

Life has no meaning. It doesn't need a meaning. A meaning is an arbitrary thought formulation that we affix to it because we are in the mood. Life is its own raison d'etre.

Frederick Lenz

Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.

Joseph Campbell

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

Rollo May

Human life has no meaning independent of itself. There is no cosmic force or deity to give it meaning or significance. There is no ultimate destiny for man. Such a belief is an illusion of humankind's infancy. The meaning of life is what we choose to give it. Meaning grows out of human purposes alone. Nature provides us with an infinite range of opportunities, but it is only our vision and our action that select and realize those that we desire.

Paul Kurtz

I am interested and deeply curious about our need for a spiritual life, a life of greater meaning, and how we come to a more ethical view of life within our communities that is more inclusive than exclusive, one that is extended even beyond our own species.

Terry Tempest Williams

How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning Living for its own sake isn't life. People need meaning as much as they need air.

Daniel H. Wilson

Each new generation asks – What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be – Why does man need a meaning to life?

Peter Wessel Zapffe

Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.

Max Lucado

Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made . Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.

Anthony de Mello

But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The way of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning--the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life--a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

Jed Rubenfeld

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

Ultimately the way to win the game of life, is found in only one thing: Our ability to choose meaning in any life circumstance. Become the master of meaning and you master your life.

Tony Robbins

Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.