“A person's creed – my life must be filled with a worthy meaning, and this is above all.”

Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
Context: An ancient author tells us somewhere, with the tone of a pedagogue, if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read. It is a precept as beautiful as a diamond of the first water cut in England, but it cannot be applied to me, because I have not written either a novel, or the life of an illustrious character. Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life. I have lived without dreaming that I should ever take a fancy to write the history of my life, and, for that very reason, my Memoirs may claim from the reader an interest and a sympathy which they would not have obtained, had I always entertained the design to write them in my old age, and, still more, to publish them.

The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin, translated by Matthieu Ricard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 541 https://books.google.it/books?id=IA1VhyLNIccC&pg=PA541.

Source: Man's Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984), p. 67 in the 1959 Beacon Press edition

Attributed to Bouguereau in: Sotheby's (Firm). (1994) 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture. p. 123; Cited in: Adolphe William Bouguereau Quotes http://www.artandinfluence.com/2010/10/adolphe-william-bouguereau-quotes.html by Armand Cabrera, Oct. 4, 2010.