What is the meaning of life?

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Nobody hands you the meaning of life like a sealed tablet at the door; I looked for it in the schools for years and found only men arguing over the wax. What I found was smaller and sturdier. A life means what a day means, and a day is spent well or badly while you are still deciding what it is for. Live according to reason, the Stoics say, and be of use to someone. I failed at both often enough to know they are not slogans but labour. So ask the humbler question: what would make tonight's account honest? Do one useful thing for one person before sleep, and write it down.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever asks this has usually decided already that the meaning sits somewhere outside him, like a coin under a stone, and that his task is to turn over stones. I distrust the asking. Who benefits from a meaning handed down? The priest, always: first he makes you suffer from its absence, then he sells it. I found no meaning lying about. In my worst years, with my head splitting and my eyes half gone, I had a why, and it was a task I had made myself. So make one. Then ask the hard test: would you live it again, endlessly, and say Yes? That is the nearest I come to an answer.

Marcus Aurelius

Meaning is not found lying somewhere, like a coin in the road. Stop looking for it there. Here is what I wrote to myself on the Danube, when the plague had taken half my army and my own children were in the ground: do the work in front of you, and do it for the common good. That is enough. A bee does not ask what the hive is for. It makes honey, and in making it is a bee. You will die soon, and your name will not last. That is no reason for despair. It is a reason to be done with the question and begin the task. What is in front of you this morning?

Søren Kierkegaard

A professor once lectured me for an hour on the meaning of life, and afterward went home to dinner, entirely satisfied. That is the comedy of the question: asked in the third person, it can be answered by anyone, and so by no one. Meaning is not found lying about like a coin on the Østergade; it is what a person's life has when one thing is willed, and willed as one's own. So I cannot hand you a result. I can only say where the either/or lies: either you hold the question at a distance, as a spectator, and remain well informed; or you let it become a question about what you will do tomorrow, and pay for that.

Michel de Montaigne

I have looked for it the way I look for my spectacles, in every place but the one I was standing in. The books gave me a dozen answers, each sworn to by a great man, and no two could share a room. Then a fall from my horse left me for a time neither here nor there, and what I remember is how little it mattered. Living was gentle, and nothing in me was asking what it was for. So I have come to think the question is often a symptom of an idle hour. Mine is a plain answer: to live our own life well and fittingly. It is a poor sort of meaning, but it fits in the hand.

Questions people bring, and how Seneca, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Kierkegaard and Montaigne answer them — each in his own way.

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