This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A change of meaning is necessary to change this world politically, economically and socially. But that change must begin with the individual; it must change for him... if meaning is a key part of reality, then, once society, the individual and relationships are seen to mean something different a fundamental change has taken place." -
"The notion of soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and its significance (which is mental) are not in any sense separately existent, but rather that they are two aspects of one overall reality... Meaning is an inherent and essential part of our overall reality... We are the totality of our meanings." -
"Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death." - Deepak Chopra
"Suicide is man’s attempt to give a final human meaning to a life which has become humanly meaningless." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"The author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the "innocence of eye" that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see "the correspondences between things" of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago." - Dorothea Brande
"We are at our very best, and we are happiest, when we are fully engaged in work we enjoy on the journey toward the goal we’ve established for ourselves. It gives meaning to our time and comfort to our sleep. It makes everything else in life so wonderful, so worthwhile." - Earl Nightingale
"Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy… Not all of these lessons are enjoyable to learn, but everyone finds that they enrich the texture of life." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Relationships offer us the biggest opportunities for learning lessons in life, for discovering who we are, what we fear, where our power comes from, and the meaning of true love." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"First learn the meaning of what you say, and then you speak." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern." - Eric Hoffer
"The mind or spirit is present everywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it and thus lose its original mobility. Like water filling a pond, which is always ready to flow off again, it can work its inexhaustible power because it is free, and be open to everything because it is empty. This state is essentially a primordial state, and its symbol, the empty circle, is not empty of meaning for him who stands within it." - Eugen Herrigel
"The bloom of human life is morality; whatever else we may possess, health and wealth, power, grace, knowledge, have a value only as they lead up to this, have a meaning only as they make this possible." - Felix Adler
"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"The meaning of life is that it stops." - Franz Kafka
"The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science; and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world... It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is no purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsiblity that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to gorow in spite of all indiginities." - Gordon Willard Allport
"Since man cannot help seeking the infinite he now seeks the meaning of his life in an infinity of things." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"Experiences of shame appear to embody the root meaning of the word - to uncover, to expose, to wound. They are experiences of exposure, exposure of peculiarly sensitive, intimate, vulnerable aspects of self. The exposure may be to others, but whether others are or are not involved, it is always… exposure to one’s own eyes." - Helen Merrell Lynd
"The ultimate meaning of history – as of life – we can find only within ourselves." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!" - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"How hard it is to confess that we have spoken without thinking, that we have talked nonsense. How many a man says a thing in haste and heat, without fully understanding or half meaning it, and then, because he has said it, holds fast to it, and tries to defend it as if it were true! But how much wiser, how much more admirable and attractive it is when a man has the grace to perceive and acknowledge his mistakes! It gives us assurance that he is capable of learning, of growing, of improving, so that his future will be better than his past." - Henry Van Dyke
"The meaning of life cannot be told; it has to happen to a person." - Ira Progoff
"Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a divine command, without which it would cease to be." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
"In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to “redeem the time” which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning n this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright." - James Freeman Clarke
"There is only one thing that remains to us, that cannot be taken away: to act with courage and dignity and to stick to the ideals that have given meaning to life." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity to pain, the only good; pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning." - Jeremy Bentham
"Part of life’s meaning comes in not being afraid to experience it on its own terms. We are constantly trying to remake and manipulate life so that it conforms to our image of what we would like it to be. In the process, we lose life’s essence. If we were to accept life on its own terms and allow other creatures to experience the fullness of their beings, we could add to the enrichment of all life." - Jeremy Rifkin
"We are each not other’s “keepers,” we are each other’s brothers and sisters. And it is in the struggle and service with our brothers and sisters, individually and collectively, that we find the meaning of life." - Jesse Jackson, fully Jesse Louis Jackson
"The core prescription for happiness and meaning handed down through all the world’s spiritual teaching is unchanging: Remember the source with gratitude, and love one another. In this way the meaning of life as an interconnected web of love and compassion becomes manifest in even the most seemingly mundane moments." - Joan Borysenko
"In the end, the meaning of life is a matter of faith. Faith is less a set of beliefs than your willingness to surrender to a mysterious force of love and guidance that helps you find your way." - Joan Borysenko
"In the end, the meaning of life is a matter of faith… faith is less a set of beliefs than your willingness to surrender to a mysterious force of love and guidance that helps you find your way." - Joan Borysenko
"It’s often during the hardest times, rather than the most peaceful ones, that you find a purpose that gives meaning to your days so that your life becomes a blessing. The passion born of meaning is more than a psychological breakthrough or an emotional coping strategy. It’s a glimpse into the soul that elevates life’s predictable hardships into sacred quests." - Joan Borysenko
"To be present at a moment when an entire society was so starved for meaning it made totems out of quite meaningless choices." - Joan Didion
"The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning." - John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
"A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory [Allegory: a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another, a symbolic narrative]." - John Keats
"The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice. Where that purpose does not exist, to give definiteness, precision, and an intelligible meaning to thought, it generates nothing better than the mystical metaphysics of the Pythagoreans or the Vedas." - John Stuart Mill
"The meaning of life is felt through relationship... Relationship with others and with one’s own self... Parenting, teaching, serving, creating. Learning from nature, the sages, our peers, from our emerging selves in a state of becoming." - Jonas Salk
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." - Joseph Campbell
"Love is the meaning of life - it is the high point of life." - Joseph Campbell
"Perceptual space, under its triple form, visual, tactile and motor, is essentially different from geometric space. It is neither homogeneous, nor isotropic; one can not even say that it has three dimensions. It is often said that we ‘project’ into geometric space the objects of our external perception; that we ‘localize’ them. Has this a meaning, and if so what? Does it mean that we represent to ourselves external objects in geometric space? Our representations are only the reproduction of our sensations; they can therefore be ranged only in the same frame as these, that is to say, in perceptual space. It is impossible for us to represent to ourselves external bodies in geometric space, as it is for a painter to paint on a plane canvas objects with their three dimensions. Perceptual space is only an image altered in shape by a sort of perspective, and we can represent to ourselves objects only by bringing them under the laws of this perspective. Therefore we do not represent to ourselves external bodies in geometric space, but we reason on these bodies as if they were situated in geometric space." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"The external forces conceal from the eyes the deep meaning of existence; true faith resides in the heart." - Kabir, also Kabīra NULL
"Great truth that transcends Nature does not pass from one being to another by way of human speech. Truth chooses Silence to convey her meaning to loving souls." - Kahlil Gibran
"Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future." - Laurens van der Post
"Without meaning to belittle the wonders of science, I do not think they can absolve mankind of suffering, desire, madness, and death." - Lewis H. Lapham
"Man's chief purpose... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life." - Lewis Mumford
"Man’s chief purpose… is the creation and preservation of value; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately to the individual and human life." - Lewis Mumford