"This, then, I should say, is the road to significance and content: join a whole, and work for it with all your body and mind. The meaning of life lies in the chance it gives us to produce, or to contribute to, something greater than ourselves. It need not be a family; that, so to speak, is the direct and broadest road, which Nature in her blind wisdom has provided for even the simplest soul; it may be any group that can call out all the latent nobility of the individual, and give him a cause to work for that shall not be shattered by his death. It may be some revolutionary association to which a man or a woman gives devotion unstintingly; or it may be a great state to whose preservation and exaltation some Pericles or Akbar devotes his genius and his life. It may occasionally be some work of beauty that absorbs the soul in its making, and becomes a boon to many generations. But in every case it must, if it will give a life meaning, lift the individual out of himself, and make him a cooperating part of a vaster scheme. The secret of significance and content is to have a task which consumes all one’s energies, and makes human life a little richer than before.
A man should have many irons in the fire; he should not let his happiness be bound up entirely with his children, or his fame, or his prosperity, or even his health; but he should be able to find nourishment for his content in any one of these, even if all the rest are taken away. My last resort, I think, would be Nature herself; shorn of all other gifts and goods, I should find, I hope, sufficient courage for existence in any mood of field and sky, or, shorn of sight, in some concourse of sweet sounds, or some poet’s memory of a day that smiled. All in all, experience is a marvelously rich panorama, from which any sense should be able to draw sustenance for living."
- On The Meaning Of Life by Will Durant
A man should have many irons in the fire; he should not let his happiness be bound up entirely with his children, or his fame, or his prosperity, or even his health; but he should be able to find nourishment for his content in any one of these, even if all the rest are taken away. My last resort, I think, would be Nature herself; shorn of all other gifts and goods, I should find, I hope, sufficient courage for existence in any mood of field and sky, or, shorn of sight, in some concourse of sweet sounds, or some poet’s memory of a day that smiled. All in all, experience is a marvelously rich panorama, from which any sense should be able to draw sustenance for living."
- On The Meaning Of Life by Will Durant
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