Robert Penn Warren Quotes

Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are "being lived".

I don’t count life as life without love

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

Whenever you do something without asking yourself, "Why am I doing this?"-that is meaningless life... . The "why" of life makes it meaningful... . Only when an answer is given is one living life as a man.

For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'

What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.

Our love is our life itself. What our love is like determines how we live and therefore everything about what we are as human beings.

Whilst I yet live, let me not live in vain.

As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties.

I guess when all is said and done, if there is one last commentary on me, I would want it to be said that I participated in my life. I was a full participant.

Getting love is a very small experience. It is the experience of beggar.

For me, singing was real life, not two plus two equals four.

I have to have a meaning in my life. If I roam around without some meaning in my life, I'm in deep and serious trouble. I can't, I just can't exist.

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life ... Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life ... second, by what we take from the world ... third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change.

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.

The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth.

Love is the measure of life; only so far as we love do we really live.

Everything has a purpose. And that purpose has a story that goes along with it. It just depends on what your passion is.

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

Thus, human existence-at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted-is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished—a life without heart is not worth living.