“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning,…" by Anaïs Nin?

Anaïs Nin278

writer of novels, short stories, and erotica 1903–1977

Related quotes

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“We are on the threshold of understanding a shining idea: that each individual’s life can have meaning, even if the universe has none.”

Eric Maisel (1947) American writer

Source: The Atheist’s Way (2009), p. 53

“Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that “each case be individualized.” If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

A Dreary Story or A Tedious Story (1889)

“For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture I, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning.”

Paulo Coelho book The Pilgrimage

Source: The Pilgrimage

“These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 199

“"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.”

Julian Jaynes (1920–1997) American psychologist

As quoted in LIFE magazine (December 1988) http://www.humancondition.info/Beyond/ScienceReligion.html

“Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole”

Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter Eight, Dark Age Patterns, p. 175

“Collective action is a means of power, a means by which individuals can more fully realize their individual values.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 16

“Universal Consciousness in movement knows itself. But it doesn't have to know each individual for the simple reason that it sees the whole plot as one whole plot.”

Ramesh Balsekar (1917–2009) Indian guru

page 38

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Anaïs Nin278

Related quotes

Related topics