The Meaning of Life

By David Kitchingman in All Sorts

42 attempts to solve the meaning of life

THE MEANING OF LIFE
It's Labour Weekend. You've got an extra day to ponder not just the meaning of labour, but the meaning of life itself. Here are responses from some famous and not so famous people to "the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" in 42 quotes (many much abbreviated). Make it into a crossword. Put a cross beside the ones you disagree with. Tick those that go down well. Put a "?" beside those that you can't work out. Let me know if you manage to solve it.

1. I don't know the meaning of life... And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.― Charles M. Schulz.
2. God is the only one who can give real meaning to life. ― Anon. 3. Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. ― Henry Miller. th
4. What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful. ― Tenzin Gyatso, 14 Dalai Lama.
5. 'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher. 'Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless. ― Ecclesiastes 1:2. NIV.
6. i was "far and away"-riding my motorcycle along an american back road, ...the theme i was grappling with was nothing less than the Meaning of Life, and i was pretty sure i had defined it: love and respect - and neither is any good without the other.― Neil Peart.
7. To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life. ― Paulo Coelho.
8. I am the way, the truth and the life. ― Jesus.
9. INTERVIEWER: Tell us a joke. WHEDON: Your life has meaning. INTERVIEWER:
Tell us a secret. WHEDON: Your life has meaning. ― Joss Whedon. 10. There are many ways to find meaning in life, one of them is the love of art. ― Ndiritu Wahome.
11. One of the greatest gifts that God gives to each of us is the love we share with our family, friends, and fellowmen. It is this divine gift of love that...gives meaning and purpose to life ― Mike Ramsdell.
12. One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life.― Colin Wilson.
13. One day, I'm going to find a man who thinks I'm the meaning of life." ― Amy Brenneman.
14. In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole. And in stories, endings matter... The peaks are important, and so is the ending... The sick and the aged ... have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer... The chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life. ― Atul Gawande.
15. Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. Being alive is the meaning. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. ― Joseph Campbell.
16. We could choose to live as though the best meaning and purpose we can find for our own lives is the very meaning and purpose of the universe itself ... as though its purpose were love. And if the universe, in the end, were to prove us wrong ... our lives, then, would have been an act of defiance of indifferent power.―. Richard Holloway.
17. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' ― Christopher Hitchens.
18. Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life. ― Max Lucado.
19. The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs. ―. Viktor E. Frankl.
20. To me living is Christ. ― St Paul.
21. You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. ― Albert Camus.
22. God is the inevitability of humanity's search for true meaning. ― Jared Brock.
23. There are some ten thousand religious sects ... each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. ― Jon Krakauer.
24. If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering. ―.Viktor E. Frankl.
25. To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. ― Ludwig Wittgenstein.
26. There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel. ― Anaïs Nin.
27. Word-work is sublime... It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference... We do language. That may be the measure of our lives.― Toni Morrison.
28. What is the meaning of human life? To answer this question at all implies a religion. ― Albert Einstein.
29. If you were to ask what provides some meaning in life nowadays for a great many people, especially men, you could do worse that reply...sport. ―.Terry Eagleton.
30. To live with faith - any old faith, perhaps - is to infuse one's life with significance. On this view, the meaning of life is a question of the style in which you live it, not in its actual content. ―.Terry Eagleton.
31. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. ― C.S. Lewis.
32. The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. ― Pablo Picasso.
33. The meaning of life is love, work, and play... People's lives have meaning to the extent that love, work, and play provide coherent and valuable goals that they can strive for and at least partially accomplish. ―. Paul Thagan.
34. The meaning of life is basically to be the kind of person you would want to be around. ― Alexei Maxim Russell.
35. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is ...questioned by life. ―. Viktor E. Frankl.
36. To be fully in the moment. Because that's all life is, really, a string of moments... Life gives meaning to life. The answer to the meaning of life is hidden right there inside the question. ― Wendy Mass.
37. No doubt our continuing wrangles over the meaning of life will prove to be fertile and productive. But in a world where we live in overwhelming danger, our failure to find common meanings is as alarming as it is invigorating. ―.Terry Eagleton.
38. The resurrection gives my life meaning and direction and the opportunity to start over no matter what my circumstances. ― Robert Flatt.
39. The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. ― Leo Tolstoy.
40. The meaning of life is that it stops. ― Franz Kafka.
41. There is no one simple and absolute answer to the quest for meaning; there are many answers. We may judge some to be better than others, but when we make that judgement we are doing so from the point where we stand... It is dangerous to assume that our own standpoint is the one and only Archimedean point. ― Lloyd Geering.
42. 'Forty-two!' yelled Loonquawl. 'Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?' 'I checked it very thoroughly,' said the computer, 'and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.' ― Douglas Adams.
David Kitchingman