“We can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 277)
Quotes about Meaning of Life
“You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 248)
“‘I just don’t understand life,’ sulked Nora. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.'”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 218)
The Midnight Library [Book]
By: Matt Haig
Book Overview: Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
“There are those who think of the meaning of life as resembling the answer to a riddle. One searches for years, and then some bright day one finds it, like the prize at the end of a treasure hunt. It is a profoundly misleading notion. The meanings in any life are multiple and varied. Some are grasped very early, some late; some have a heavy emotional component, some are strictly intellectual; some merit the label religious, some are better described as social. But each kind of meaning implies a relationship between the person and some larger system of ideas or values, a relationship involving obligations as well as rewards. In the individual life, meaning, purpose and commitment are inseparable. When one succeeds in the search for identity one has found the answer not only to the question ‘Who am I?’ but to a lot of other questions too: ‘What must I live up to? What are my obligations? To what must I commit myself?'”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 103)
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“The Zen master warns: ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 188)
“We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation…we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning
“The patient/pilgrim insists that there must be some meaning that he just has not yet gotten hold of or else he would be happy. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Why did all this happen to me?’ He believes that if only he could understand, if only the therapist would explain it to him, then he could live with life as it is and be happy. But ‘the meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.’ The point is that there is no point. In a world of billion[s], countless numbers long dead and an infinite number yet to be born, how important are the momentary frustrations or satisfactions of any one of us?”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 41)
“It’s hard to think about selflessness when we are struggling. And yet that is exactly what I learned as a monk. Selflessness is the surest route to inner peace and a meaningful life. Selflessness heals the self.”
Jay Shetty, Think Like A Monk (Page 256)
“All paralyzed people—psychologically paralyzed, spiritually paralyzed—live life in hell. And how do they create it? The secret is that they live in fear; they only do a certain thing when there is no fear, but then there is nothing left worth doing. All that is worth doing has certain fears around it.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 58)
“The real question we should ask ourselves is not ‘How big can we get?’ but instead ‘What kind of life do we want to live?’ The magic happens when we shift our focus from size to significance. We might discover that ‘enough’ is a lot less than we thought. Because we’re conditioned to believe that ‘more’ is synonymous with ‘better’. But often, it’s just synonymous with more stress, more time away from family, and more sacrifices.”
Justin Welsh
