"If we hope to live not just from moment to moment but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives."
                          -Bruno Bettelheim

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Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt.  Meaning is something you build into your life.  You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the thing and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.  The ingredients are there.  You are the only one who can put them together into that pattern that will be your life.  Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you.  If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

-John Gardner

Most people think that the thing we are looking for in life is meaning.  I don't think that's it at all.  I think that most people are looking for an experience that connects them to the ecstasy of what it could feel like to be totally alive.  To know the unburdened state of total aliveness is the pinnacle of the human potential.

Life is without meaning.
You bring the meaning to it.
The meaning of life is
whatever you ascribe it to be.
Being alive is the meaning.

-Joseph Campbell

-Carl Jung