WILL DURANT'S GUIDELINES FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE

1.  Have a purpose — “To have a great purpose to work for, a purpose larger than ourselves, is one of the secrets of making life significant; for then the meaning and worth of the individual overflow his personal borders, and survive his death.”

2.  Meet people face-to-face —  “The more I see of men and women the less critical I am of them; they are not half so bad as their newspapers and moving pictures make them out to be;“

3.  Appreciate life — “If you are well -- if you can stand on your legs and digest your food -- forget your whining, and shout your gratitude to the sun. The simplest meaning of life, then, is joy -- the exhilaration of experience itself.”

4.  Accept death — “Let death come; meanwhile I have seen the purple hills of South Dakota, and one point of a star taking its place quietly in the evening sky. Nature will destroy me, but she has a right to -- she made me, and burned my senses with a thousand delights; she gave me all that she will take away. How shall I ever thank her sufficiently for these five senses of mine -- these fingers and lips, these eyes and ears, this restless tongue and this gigantic nose?”

5. “Do not be ungrateful about love. . . there is ample recompense for that in the unconscious consciousness that someone is interested in you, depends upon you, exaggerates you, and is waiting to meet you at the station. Solitude is worse than war.”

6. Join — “I note that those who are cooperating parts of a whole do not despond; the despised ‘yokel’ playing ball with his fellows in the lot is happier than these isolated thinkers, who stand aside from the game of life and degenerate through the separation.“

7.  Contribute — “The meaning of life lies in the chance it gives us to produce, or to contribute to, something greater than ourselves.”

8.  Celebrate — ”In the end I know how vain and snobbish all advice is, and how hard it is for one human being to understand another, but come and spend an hour with me, and I will show you a path through the woods which will better dissuade you from surrender than all the arguments of my books. Come and tell me what a childish optimist I am: lay you freely, and damn this middling world as you will; I shall agree with everything but your conclusion. Then we shall eat the bread of peace together, and let the prattle of the children restore our youth.”