“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”

As quoted in Zen and the Art of Making a Living : A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design (1999) by Laurence G. Boldt, p. 118

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning." by P. D. Ouspensky?
P. D. Ouspensky photo
P. D. Ouspensky 41
Russian esotericist 1878–1947

Related quotes

Confucius photo

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Tom Hiddleston photo

“We all have two lives. The second begins when you realize you only have one.”

Tom Hiddleston (1981) English actor, producer and musical performer

Albert Camus photo

“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in the newspaper Alger Républicain (20 October 1938), p. 5; also quoted in Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002) by Avi Sagi, p. 43
Context: It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness.
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

Katherine Mansfield photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Mikhail Gorbachev photo

“In the beginning we imprudently generated great expectations, without taking into account the fact that it takes time for people to realize that all have to live and work differently, to stop expecting that new life would be given from above.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Nobel Address (1991)
Context: A period of transition to a new quality in all spheres of society's life is accompanied by painful phenomena. When we were initiating perestroika we failed to properly assess and foresee everything. Our society turned out to be hard to move off the ground, not ready for major changes which affect people's vital interests and make them leave behind everything to which they had become accustomed over many years. In the beginning we imprudently generated great expectations, without taking into account the fact that it takes time for people to realize that all have to live and work differently, to stop expecting that new life would be given from above.

Matsushita Konosuke photo

“Our social mission as a manufacturer is only realized when products reach, are used by, and satisfy the customer… We need to take the customer's skin temperature daily.”

Matsushita Konosuke (1894–1989) Japanese businessman

Kōnosuke Matsushita in: Nihon Seisansei Honbu (1984), Strategies for productivity: international perspectives, p. 124

Erich Maria Remarque photo
W.B. Yeats photo

“When we are rejected in the world, we will recover only as we begin to realize that we must hold on to our sense of who we are and not be defeated by outside evaluations.”

Dr. Rose Marie Toussaint http://haiti.org/dt_team/dr-rose-marie-toussaint/, Pearls of Excellence Exhibit, Haitian Embassy

Related topics