Quotes About Meaning

There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & say it was good.

I've never been good with current events, she told us. I always keep getting bogged down with simple things, like 'why are we here?

You're the strangest person I ever met, she said & I said you too & we decided we'd know each other a long time.

Many celebrate Christmas with emotion and even the right information, but they have not made the reality of Christmas personal to them. Don't let that be you."-Brian Brodersen-12/24/17

One of the beautiful things about mathematical physics is that equations contain stories.

the more one respects Jesus, the more one must be brokenhearted, embarrassed, furious, or some combination thereof when one considers what we Christians have done with Jesus. That's certainly true when it comes to calling Jesus Lord, something we Christians do a lot, often without the foggiest idea of what we mean. Has he become (I shudder to ask this) less our Lord and more our Mascot?

Hope is a bunch of warrantless desires that do not make or break anything; only actions do.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.

But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen - to use an image you'll understand - it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of... fact.

Biblical writers did not teach their cosmography as scientific doctrine revealed by God about the way the physical universe was materially structured, they assumed the popular cosmography to teach their doctrine about God's purposes and meaning. To critique the cosmic model carrying the message is to miss the meaning altogether, which is the message.

Text without context is pretext.

Language embodies a worldview that does not often translate through the words.

It turns out that the commonly used standard we cited above of interpreting the Bible through our plain sense, common sense, ordinary and usual meaning is an act of cultural prejudice. Our Western plain sense literalism is simply not the priority in a very symbolic genre of a different culture with a different plain sense than ours, different colloquialisms and memes than ours, and a different sense of what is ordinary and usual.

When the plain sense of prophecy makes sense, beware your own bias and seek the genre sense. Take every word at its primary, extraordinary, symbolic meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and historical facts, indicate clearly otherwise.

there is an inherent rationality to life that makes it intelligible at a much deeper level than functional utility …

Seeker, who says religion is the way to God?

Wish not for treasure you can hold, No gleaming jewels, bright and cold, For finer still than pearl or gold, The treasure of a tale well told...

Of course words are magic. That's why they call it spelling.