If you do not think for yourself, but rather try to find the answer by reading other people's work you will never find any real meanings, because the Sages or wise people have something in their mind but write it only indirectly about it, either knowingly or unknowingly. When they do it knowingly, they do it, quite paradoxically, to help you, so that you can find the meaning of life or any other subject matter by yourself. Additionally there are some thoughts or knowledge in the mind of the writer that they themselves do not know how they know it. Even worst, there is a deep paradox at the core of existence that is not amenable to logic, inaccessible to ordinary intuition, and hence not communicable in writings. So, instead they write only the parts of what they know with full confidence but something is always missing from their writing. Words are not really enough to convey what they actually trying to say. One way or another, unfortunately, you cannot have the complete understanding and knowledge of being from the writings of your fellow people, although it might help you as long as you yourself is also thinking and verifying by your best inner judgments (see thought training essay). On the other hand there are some half wise who will deliberately hide the telltale signs or giveaways of their ignorance and will try to pretend as wise as their masters. The only way they can achieve it by obfuscation, difficult sentence and wordings and introducing a bunch of unnecessary and useless new terms to sound erudite. In this way they earn your confidence for their own ego boost and your demise. You will also find some quasi-wise who are just downright imbecile but unfortunately trained themselves to read, write and talk. Those are the real culprit for the confusion in the world if you take those stupid babeler as an authority, unsuspectingly, just because were were taught in the school as blind dogma.

Example: Plato.

Most of the Pre-Socratics came into the same truth but they approached it from different directions so what they were saying is partly true, but truth, nonetheless. It is like the elephant seeing by the binds. Some of the Pre-Socratics actually experienced the truth but only from different side of the elephant so their description seems totally disparate, enough for anybody to reject them altogether, if that person does not have the eyes to see it correctly. Plato, who himself never experienced the reality that the Pre-Socratics experienced, but pretended that he understood what they were trying to say and reconstructed a monstrous metaphysics, quite innocently. This is the problem of not knowing and not acknowledging one's own limitations and folly, and when one tries to hide it. But those who believed Plato as the authority, instead of themselves, are suffering intellectually and they deserve this suffering because it's simply self-inflicted.

On the other hand, instead of using the schema constructed by other people, if you think and observe yourself, you can reach a valid conclusion, all by yourself. After finding the meaning and the conclusion, as you read others sages, you will see that you are Right, too. Only in this way you can have your flower of your own, rather than poisonous schema injected by others, typically in schools. 

Footnote: 

If you don't know the meaning of the word babel, do your homework and read the meaning in context of Tower of babel.