Quotes About Mattering

Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.

Purpose is the primary fuel of ambition. Purpose creates a destination. We can only become fully engaged in life when we feel that we are doing something that really matters. Purpose is what inspires us, lights us up, and floats our boats. Washington Irving—the famous author, historian and essayist—said, "Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it.

Thank you... preseason football, for having all the excitement, commercials, and time-outs of the regular season, but with none of the mattering. I appreciate it. Thank you.

All of me, every aspect of my being, is important. I count for something. I matter. My feelings can be trusted. My thinking is appropriate. I value my wants and needs. I do not deserve and will not tolerate abuse or constant mistreatment. I have rights, and it is my responsibility to assert these rights. The decisions I make and the way I conduct myself will reflect my high self-esteem.

Whatever success you are having will never completely fulfill you. A life of significance — of really mattering — is yours for the taking, and the process I describe in this book will work for you.

The next home-going service at your church could be yours. And the most important thing on that day won't be the amount of flowers that surround your casket or how well the choir sings your favorite hymn. The only thing that will matter is how well you use that dash between the day you were born and the day you die.

Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn't just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence." She smiled at Edith. "I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.

Attention paid to the life, to the fact of life, to events and people, their enormous mattering--all the things that could not be more obvious when we're brought awake, but that really do get slurred away by distraction, sometimes for long periods, so that when the feeling does come back again, it seems like something that needs to be marked, sewn a la Blaise Pascal right into the lining of your coat--where you will always see it and remember

The primary material conditions for the making of beauty have not changed. But the frame of attention, and the context of mattering—these have.

Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else. They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

Love is what's left when being in love has gone, okay? It's when you care about someone and you hope they're happy, but you're not under any illusions about them. Maybe that kind of love is not exciting and passionate and all those things that fade with time. All those things that you're so keen on. But in the end it's the only kind of love that really matters.

The intensity of mattering, while ideologically constructed, is nevertheless always beyond ideological challenge because it is called into existence affectively.

He had a gift for seizing joy, grabbing opportunities, and holding on to things that matter. And he had an unusual knack for an even more difficult task: letting go of all the rest.

Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.

Leave an imprint. You're young now. But when you get older and look back at your life, you'll ask yourself a whole bunch of questions. Did I make a difference? Did I contribute something? Did my being here matter? Dud I do something that left an imprint? I'm not asking you to end hunger or repair the ozone. But I am asking you to think about your purpose --- to recognize that your life isn't infinite, and that you should use your limited time here to do something that matters.

Not knowing who you are is the greatest tragedy of all. The rigid family-system roles sealed during adolescence become the most conscious identity you have. In fact, these roles become addictions. By being in the role, you feel that you matter. To let go of the role would be to touch the deep reservoir of toxic shame that binds your original pain, the core of which is the spiritual wound. When you lost your I AMness, you lost your mattering.

Our fear of not mattering much has the potential to draw us away from what matters most.

The memory brought back the timbre of her voice and the tickle of her hair on my chin as I put her to bed that night and the feeling of belonging to someone, mattering to someone, having someone whose first smile in the morning was for you. Someone who slipped their hand into yours when they were scared and trusted you to make them feel better. Someone who knew you, the important things about you, and loved you anyway.

This was before I knew that we all live on this planet, driving in the cars of our own little minds, our own self-contained worlds. Yes, this was before I knew that, when I thought that I mattered, when I thought that people saw me, deep into me, saw all my love and excitement at being alive, saw the very glistening, running-overness of my aliveness. But we only matter when we do something awful. Then, someone sees us and only then.