Echoes

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, honorable, compassionate.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.

While I breathe, I hope.

The quality I look for most is optimism: especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Through endurance we conquer.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

All life is problem-solving.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind — honest work, which you intend getting done.

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I believe people work for satisfaction.

Be thou never without something to do; be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or doing something that is useful to the community.