Quotations
Scientists, theologians and philosophers are not the only thinkers to write about the meaning of human life. Many poets, novelists and other artists have addressed this issue as well and their wisdom adds another dimension to the topic. The great novelists in particular have a lot to say about what is most meaningful to human beings and how one should live. As a psychologist, I have learned at least as much – and perhaps more – about human nature from reading the great novels than I have from studying psychology textbooks. Leo Tolstoy’s insights into human motivation in (what I think) is the greatest novel ever written, “Anna Karenina”, are extraordinary. In this chapter I have collected quotes that address meaning in life. My search was certainly not exhaustive and I was selective about which quotes to include). I have clustered them underFrankl’s three values where he says meaning can be found.
Experiential Values
For many people, the experience that gave their life meaning was a religious or spiritual experience but, by far, the most commonly cited experiential “meaning of life” in the quotations that I have come across is Love. Here are some examples:
• “There is the land of the living and the land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only meaning, the only survival.”
(The last sentence of Thornton Wilder’ novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”)
• The novelist, George Sand (her real name was Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin Baronet Dudevant), in a letter, wrote: “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved”.
• “In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love”, wrote the painter, Marc Chagall
• Viktor Frankl wrote the following while being marched to forced labor in a Nazi concentration camp:
“………That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved………”
• “…Love stands opposed to death – it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death…” (from the epic 1924 novel, “The Magic Mountain”, by the German Nobel laureate, Thomas Mann)
• I recently read Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday” and was surprised and pleased when the hero recites one of my favorite poems, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, from memory in an attempt to impress the violent home invaders with “his daughter’s” poetry:
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Creative Values
The second most common meaning in life found in literature is doing something that is meaningful. It can be simply doing a job really well or it can be doing something charitable. For Shakespeare it was writing plays and sonnets, for Mozart it was writing operas and symphonic music. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson refers to this kind of meaningful activity as “Generativity” and he says that most people discover this meaning by producing and raising children. I remember, when writing my autobiography, deriving satisfaction from imaging my only grandchild, now five years of age, reading it and getting to know about her great, great grandmother (my beloved maternal grandmother) by reading what I wrote. It’s as close to immortality as we can get2
• Dorothea, a “Mother Theresa” type character in George Eliot’s (real name: Mary Anne Evans) novel, “Middlemarch”, makes it sound obvious that doing good works is the only meaning of life: “What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
In the Finale of the novel, the author, summing things up, says: “…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
• Levin, in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, “Anna Karenina”, is one of the most sympathetic characters in all of literature. He agonizes over the meaning of life, searching philosophic and theological texts for answers. But for a man who does not know why he lives, he doesn’t hesitate to rush to the deathbed of his brother when he learns of his brother’s terminal illness and there he cares for his brother until his death. Back home, when he resumes his academic search for the meaning of life, his wife points out to her husband that his recent behavior toward his brother may indicate that he already knows what the meaning of life is. In the last words of the novel, Levin says: “…my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”
• In his 17th century novel, “Candide”, Voltaire has the heroine say: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” [We must cultivate our garden.]” “Our garden”, of course, is a metaphor for our life’s work.
• “She heard him chuckling, and after a while he said, ‘Dagny, there’s nothing of any importance in life – except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value’” (from the novel, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand)
• “Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.”
(Paul Gauguin, French artist)
• “This is our purpose: to make life as meaningful as possible, this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.” (Oswald Spengler, German historian)
• Dedicate some part of your life to others. Your dedication will not be a sacrifice. It will be an exhilarating experience because it is an intense effort applied toward a meaningful end.” (Dr. Tom Dooley, humanitarian and physician in the U.S. Navy)
Attitudinal Values
Attitudinal values do not necessarily involve an experiential value (which, to quote Frankl, means “experiencing something – such as goodness, truth and beauty or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness”). Nor do attitudinal values involve doing something (creative values). Rather attitudinal values involve, again to quote Frankl, “…rising above ourselves and growing beyond ourselves, in a word by changing ourselves…to see in life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.” Examples are compassion, bravery or a good sense of humor.
One meaning in life that derives from an attitudinal value and that crops up in several places is the attitude of striving to become all that you are capable of becoming. Abraham Maslow, the father of Humanistic Psychology called this Self-Actualization.
• Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian wrote that we should “… venture wholly to be oneself as an individual.” He also said: “Be that self which one truly is.”
• In Hamlet (Act III, Scene 1), Shakespeare says something similar: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, that thou then canst be false to any man.”
• But the best expression of this meaning of life, derived from an attitudinal value can be found in Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” (which British novelist, Martin Amis, describes as the best American novel ever written):
“…you will understand, Mr. Mintouchian, if I tell you that I have always tried to become what I am. But it’s a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by nature isn’t good enough?” I was close to tears as I said it to him. “I suppose I better, anyway, give in and be it………………”It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever,” he (Augie) said.” Unfortunately, poor Augie never achieved this.
Of course there is no reason why one cannot impose more than one meaning on one’s life. Here is a quote I came across recently that says it all. These words were written by Joseph Addison, a British politician, playwright and essayist (1672-1719):
“Three grand essentials in this life are something to do, something to love, and
something to hope for.”
