“People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered… more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love; today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder, and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.” ~ Osho, Fame, Fortune, and Ambition
“Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end. If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and that has no connection to you. You may not see this, but you can be sure that the public will feel it and that they will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit it was created in. If you are excited and obsessive in the hunt, it will show in the details. If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery
“To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.” ~ Mark Mason, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.” ~ Mark Mason, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” ~ Sigmund Freud, via The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.” ~ Mark Mason, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“We’re here to connect. Love, time, death. Now these three things connect every single human being on earth. We long for love, we wish we had more time and we fear death.” ~ Howard Inlet (Will Smith), Collateral Beauty
“It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how great your connections are, how much money you have. When you want to do something – something big and important and meaningful – you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“Where are we trying to get to with our incessant activity? To the stars? But we’re already as among the stars as we will ever be. Better quality of life? The quality we seek is lost in the seeking. Truly we have it backward with our continual striving for what we don’t have and avoidance of what we do. What we crave most deeply we have always had.” ~ Robert Kull, Solitude
“Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.” ~ Meryl Streep, via Blog of Jonathan Fields
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw, via Blog of Jonathan Fields
“People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell, via Solitude
“Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.” ~ Adrian Van Kaam, via Solitude
“If you have not lived rightly, you will not be able to die rightly. Death is the final offering. It is the highest; it is the crowning or the peak. Death is the essence and the flowering of life. How can your death be right if you have spent your life wrongly? How can your death be full of meaning if your life has been a waste? How can a tree whose roots are rotten bear sweet fruit? It is impossible.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying
“Ask yourself, ‘What makes my heart sing?’ Your passion is not a passing interest or even a hobby. A passion is something that is intensely meaningful and core to your identity. Once you identify what your passion is, can you say it influences your daily activities? Can you incorporate it into what you do professionally?” ~ Carmine Gallo, Talk Like TED