Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity

What is belief really?  We can now reply like this: it is a way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality ... it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up.  

For in fact man does not live on the bread of practicability alone; he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning.  Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.  Without the word, without meaning, without love, he falls into the situation of no-longer-being-able-to-live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance. 

To try to manufacture [meaning] would resemble Baron Münchhausen’s absurd attempt to pull himself up out of the bog by his own hair.  I believe that the absurdity of this story mirrors very accurately the basic situation of man.  No one can pull himself up out of the bog….