Last Updated on December 20, 2022
What is the meaning of life?
This is one of the most elusive questions ever. The answer to this question depends on what the inquirer has in mind.
To some people, the meaning of life can be summed up as the reasons for existing. Those who subscribe to this school of thought view life in terms of achieving one’s purpose in this world. That purpose could range from meeting personal goals to empowering one’s community.
There’s another category that views life based on the practical experiences that we go through in our daily interactions with our surroundings. Most people who hold this philosophy tend to look at life in terms of its realistic as opposed to idyllic nature.
But no matter what you perceive life to be, one thing’s for sure – we’re all in this world to pursue our full measure of success and happiness, with the hopes that we leave it better than we found it. In other words, life isn’t only about accumulating wealth and knowledge. It also entails using our gifts and privileges to uplift others.
Also, while life may mean different things to different people, there are common ways to uncover your true purpose in this world. One way to go about that is by doing something different. This usually involves pursuing an endeavor outside your comfort zone.
You can also find the meaning of life by doing something you’ve always longed for. Whether it’s the thrill of conquering Mt. Everest or the therapeutic experience of meditating in nature, doing what you’ve always desired is an excellent way to appreciate your purpose in this universe.
Another way to discover the meaning of life is by taking inspiration from life quotes. And in this post, we list 135 most profound quotes about life.
Most life quotes in this collection attempt to address the reasons for living. These quotes will inspire you to discover your purpose in this world by challenging you to unlock your true potential. You’ll appreciate the importance of stepping out of your comfort zone and going all out to chase your dreams.
Some life quotes also offer insightful tips on how to go through life’s most tumultuous experiences and emerge unscathed. This category of life quotes tackles the dark side of life by addressing grim sub-themes like death, depression, and misfortune.
Our collection of life quotes also includes sayings on love, romance, and friendship. In this category, you’ll learn about the right qualities to cultivate in order to attract your soulmate. The category also includes quotes on how to keep, not only your romantic partners, but also your friends and business associates.
Last but not least, there are inspirational quotes on success and entrepreneurship. Here’s where you’ll find all the invaluable lessons on time management and personal finance, as well as the space of wealth in society. Besides, you’ll pick up a few tips on failure and the importance of picking yourself up whenever you fall.
Deep Quotes About Life
Nearly all major topics are well-covered in the below amazing collection of life quotes, so read on and be inspired.
1. “Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.” – Elie Wiesel
2. “Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” – Steve Jobs
3. “I know all about how one moment could haunt you for the rest of your life. How it consumes you and every facet of your life.” – Micalea Smeltzer
4. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” – Diane Ackerman
5. “You shouldn’t have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer.” – Daniel Quinn
6. “When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.” – C.S. Lewis
7. “Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
8. “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” – Mother Teresa
9. “I’ve hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it’s the only way to deal with things.” – Alice Feeney
10. “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
11. “Turning your back on the darkness didn’t mean the darkness would turn it’s back on you.”― Jennifer Donnelly
12. “Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared.” – Robert Greene
13. “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
14. “The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” – Stephanie Perkins
15. “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” – Mark Twain
16. “What matters in life is what you care about and what you will continue to make effort toward caring about it.” -Nokwethemba Nkosi
17. “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill
18. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin
19. “If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are a slave.” ~ Dr. Wayne Dyer
20. “Life is too deep for words, so don’t try to describe it, just live it.” – C. S. Lewis
21. “I want to be like water. I want to slip through fingers, but hold up a ship.”― Michelle Williams
22. “A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.” – Henrik Ibsen
23. “Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.” – Anne Frank
24. “Could I have been anyone other than me?”― Dave Matthews
25. “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” – Buddha
26. “Take life one step at a time look forward to your future, stop looking back and regretting the past, the past is the past because it does not last!” – Abhishek Tiwari
27. “Happiness is within. It has nothing to do with how much applause you get or how many people praise you. Happiness comes when you believe that you have done something truly meaningful.” – Martin Yan
28. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglass
29. “I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread.” – Mitch Hedberg
30. “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” – Kahlil Gibran
31. “The longer I go about living, I see it’s the relationship that is most meaningful.” – William Shatner
32. “Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.” – Bell Hooks
33. “Sometime, when you least expect it, you’ll realize that someone loved you. And that means that someone can love you again! And that will make you smile.” – Homer Simpson
34. “It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.” – Epicurus
35. “If I love myself I love you. If I love you I love myself.” – Rumi
36. “Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.” – Erich Fromm
37. “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
38. “Good friends help you to find important things when you have lost them…your smile, your hope, and your courage.” – Doe Zantamata
39. “Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” – Albert Camus
40. “The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller
41. “You might want someone else to save you, or might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really, not from yourself.” – Ava Dellaira
42. “It is better to have a meaningful life and make a difference than to merely have a long life.” – Bryant H. McGill
43. “The fullness of life is only accessible in the present moment.” – Eckhart Tolle
44. “Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.” – Albert Camus
45. “Life is in ourselves and not in the external.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
46. “Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.” – Alexandre Dumas
47. “Today me will live in the moment, unless it is unpleasant, in which case I will eat a cookie.” – Cookie Monster
48. “Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.” – Bertrand Russell
49. “With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” – William Wordsworth
50. “It is only in our darkest hours that we may discover the true strength of the brilliant light within ourselves that can never, ever, be dimmed.” – Doe Zantamata
51. “Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.” – Harper Lee
52. “What matters most in life is often invisible.” — Duane Elgin
53. “For every minute you are angry you lose 60 seconds of happiness.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
54. “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
55. “The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” – Stephen Furtick
56. “Knowing what must be done does away with fear.” – Rosa Parks
57. “Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.” — Jackson Brown Jr.
58. “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michel Angelo
59. “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
60. “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” – Isaac Asimov
61. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein
62. “You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.” — Tom Wilson
63. “No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying.” – Tony Robbins
64. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
– George Bernard Shaw
65. “When things go wrong, don’t go with them.” — Elvis Presley
66. “If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.” – Toni Morrison
67. “Have I not destroyed my enemy when I have made him into my friend?” – Abraham Lincoln
68. “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” ― Bill Gates
69. “If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.” – Peace Pilgrim
70. “Everything you can imagine is real.” ― Pablo Picasso
71. “The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.” – Alexandre Dumas
72. “People do not lack strength; they lack will.” – Victor Hugo
73. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” – Seneca
74. “A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
75. “Look for the thing you notice but no one else notices.” – Rick Rubin
76. “You can tell a pioneer by the arrows in his back.” – Beverly Rubik
77. “Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.” – Rumi
78. “Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.” – Nikola Tesla
79. “Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.” – Edward Abbey
80. “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” – Victor Hugo
81. “Every strength is also a weakness. The opposite is true as well.” – Neil Strauss
82. “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” – William Faulkner
83. “To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
84. “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” – Oscar Wilde
85. “The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.” – Kahlil Gibran
86. “Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.”
― Sun Tzu
87. “Nothing will work unless you do.” – Maya Angelou
88. “We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
― Cesare Pavese
89. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
90. “The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.”
― Brennan Manning
91. “Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life.” – Sophia Loren
92. “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” ― Aldous Huxley
93. “The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.” – Kahlil Gibran
94. “Your mind can be either your prison or your palace. What you make it is yours to decide” ― Bernard Kelvin Clive
95. “The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.”– Michel de Montaigne
96. “Do you think it is better to fail at something worthwhile, or succeed at something meaningless.”― Tommy Wallach
97. “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln
98. “Let your action manifest your thought, your belief and your passion.”― Mohammed Ali Bapir
99. “The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” – Bertrand Russell
100. “Don’t use yesterday’s state of mind, to make today’s decision.”― C. Nzingha Smith
101. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”— John A. Shedd
102. “Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.”― Oscar Wilde
103. If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.– Nora Roberts
104. “Even when we do not actively participate in our destiny, we are still on a chosen path. Life has a way of making decisions for us.”― Nina Guilbeau
105. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Kierkegaard
106. “It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”— L.M. Montgomery
107. “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” ~ Dr. Seuss
108. “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”— Confucius
109. “For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.” – Audrey Hepburn
110. “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
— Elbert Hubbard
111. “You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things; to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.” – Sir Edmund Hillary
112. “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha
113. “Believe in yourself, take on your challenges, dig deep within yourself to conquer fears. Never let anyone bring you down. You got to keep going.” – Chantal Sutherland
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of keep pushing quotes about moving forward.
114. “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” – Abraham Lincoln
115. “When you are your own best friend, you don’t endlessly seek out relationships, friendships, and validation from the wrong sources because you realize that the only approval and validation you need is your own.” – Mandy Hale
116. “The unhappy derive comfort from the misfortunes of others.”
— Aesop
117. “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
118. “Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.” — Khalil Gibran
119. “Life is like a piano. The white keys represent happiness and the black shows sadness. But as you go through life’s journey, remember that the black keys also make music.” – Unknown
120. “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”— Morrie Schwartz
121. “What we have done for ourselves alone, dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” – Albert Pike
122. “Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.” – Malcolm S. Forbes
123. “All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
124. “Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.”
– Robert Kiyosaki
125. “You just decide what your values are in life and what you are going to do, and then you feel like you count, and that makes life worth living. It makes my life meaningful.” – Annie Lennox
126. “Time is a created thing. To say “I don’t have time”, is like saying, “I don’t want to.” – Lao Tzu
127. “Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”
—Muhammad Ali
128. “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” – Martin Luther
129. “Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”—Roy T. Bennett
130. “Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.” – Rumi
131. “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” —Erol Ozan
132. “What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.” – Nicholas Nassim Taleb
133. “The best and the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or ever touched. They must be felt with the heart.”—Helen Keller
134. “The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – William Faulkner
135. “When you train your eyes to see the magic and miracles in the little things, you open the door for your whole life to shift.”—Carol Woodliff