Quotes About Meaning

I had moved back to Kenya after undergrad, and I went through this crisis of, 'What is my life going to be about?'

Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller 'Self-Help.'

Somebody the other day had a review, called me 'America's reprobate.' And I don't even know what that means, but I kinda like the way it sounds.

The physical environment of L.A. is really beautiful. It's actually kinda fun, too, if you're working. It's just not really fun if you're not working and you don't know anybody.

I feel a kinship to the idea of beloved stories and beloved pieces of art that we can imagine in different ways and sort of take a meta approach in terms of what those stories offer us.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

I knew how to read a contract by 10 years old, but I didn't know what it meant for somebody to come in and tell me they loved me and kiss me goodnight. That's a problem.

I'm not even a just a kitchen cook - everything we do has a purpose, and there's meaning to it.

I once told a journalist that girls call me 'Kitten,' but I couldn't have been more sarcastic, and no matter how many times I've said that it was a joke, it still doesn't go away.

Mubarak would meet with me when I was at Central Command. He would lean and put his hand on my knee, as if a father figure, and say, 'General, don't ever forget the Arab Street. Listen to the Arab Street.' I'd like to go to him now and say, 'Mr. President, what about that Arab Street, what's that all about?'

If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Just making the crowd laugh is not really doing things for me anymore. That's just knowing how to kill; I've learned how to kill - but also learned when a crowd's laughter is meaningful.

Knowing that people make my songs their own is what keeps me going.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

If you labor heavily upon a work of art, then part of what you are saying is, 'This is a heavy work of art.' If you happen to be trying to say something about lightness, then the art should be light as well.

A lot of the arguments about religion going on at the moment spring from a rather inept understanding of religious truth Our notion changed during the early modern period when we became convinced that the only path to any kind of truth was reason. That works beautifully for science but doesn't work so well for the humanities. Religion is really an art form and a struggle to find value and meaning amid the ghastly tragedy of human life.

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.

Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.

She's had the moment. A moment isn't a piece of time, it's a question. A realization. A trauma. The moment comes when you look up and see your life stretching out for seventy more years….Is this life good enough for the next seventy years?

Getting to know oneself is a lifelong process, and knowing God is a matter that takes eternity; yet it is only as we get to know ourselves as well as the God who transcends us that we can discover our unique reasons for being, our goals.