Some quotes from one my absolute favourite philosophers,
epicurus. Especially for those of us who aren't religious, meaning isn't readily apparent for us (some people dont care about meaning at all) but i think he's came the closest i've found for a recipe for a good life.
Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life,
by far the most important is
friendship.
Do not spoil
what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things
you only hoped for.
Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us
entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of
friendship.
You
don't develop
courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by
surviving difficult times and
challenging adversity.
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist. (This one is a fantastic part of his philosophy. It's a lot deeper than one line as well. Death is nothing. It is the end of experience. It will not be a negative or horrible experience, it will be nothing. You do not experience or live through death. He points out that its almost silly to fear death itself. As long as we exist, we are experiencing things, we are alive. When death comes, it is simply the end of experience, we are not there to go through it. So, we should not live in the shadow of death, we should be mindful of it but not fear it. Make the best life we can out of our short window of experiencing it.)
Nothing
is enough for the man to whom enough is
too little.
If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his
riches but take away from his
desires.
It is better for you to be
free of fear lying upon
a pallet, than to have a
golden couch and a
rich table and be full of
troubleThe greater the difficulty, the more the
glory in surmounting it.
A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.
Riches do not exhilarate us so much with their possession as they
torment us with their
loss.
It is impossible to live a
pleasant life without living
wisely and
well and
justly. And it is impossible to live
wisely and
well and
justly without living a
pleasant life.
And my own personal favourite:
Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. (A lot of his original work has been lost and i don't buy the attribution of one or two of these to him but they're still good quotes none the less)