Here are some of my favorite quotes on this ultimate topic of the meaning of life.  I pulled many of these quotes from my favorite quote site:  The Quotations Page, where you can find hundreds more quotes on the meaning of life” and thousands of quotes on numerous other topics.

Is there life before death?
Graffito, in Belfast

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

Life is a long lesson in humility.
James M. Barrie (1860 – 1937)

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
R. D. Laing

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.
Fran Lebowitz (1950 – )
– More quotations on: [Life] [Sleep]

Life is just one damned thing after another.
Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915)

It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead (1903 – 1968)

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
Brendan Gill

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot (1826 – 1877)

A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 – 1873)

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
Barry Switzer (1937 – )

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902)

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
Robert Heinlein (1907 – 1988), “Job”, 1984

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001)

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

I consider being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill.
Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902)

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anais Nin (1903 – 1977), The Diary of Anais Nin, volume 3, 1939-1944

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.
Earl Warren (1891 – 1974)

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
William James (1842 – 1910)

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), Society and Solitude: Works and Days, 1870

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), Walden: Reading, 1854