Quotes About Meaning

If you truly love life, don't waste time because time is what life is made of.

The meaning of life is that it is to be lived.

So this is what life is really about, Twingo thought as he listened, living and dying unto God. He had seen men die on the battlefield, torn apart in a burst of entrails, and God hadn't seemed to have much to do with it, but Schwester Kasimira, reading away holy German words out of her big book, seemed to know that even those untidy deaths had been died unto God.

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

How do evil, death and deception find power over the Motilone people?' I asked. "Through the ears,' Bobby answered, because language is so important to the Motilones. It is the essence of life. If evil language comes through the ears, it means death.

Salvation in its true and full meaning is synonymous with exaltation or eternal life and consists in gaining an inheritance in the highest of the three heavens within the celestial kingdom. With few exceptions this is the salvation of which the scriptures speak. It is the salvation which the saints seek. (Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed., Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966, p. 670.)

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It's one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

History was a subject that bored me in middle and high school, but I devoured it now. It seemed to hold some of the essential pieces to the identity questions I was asking. How could I know who I was if I didn't have a clue as to where I'd personally and collectively come from? What does it mean to be an American is all caught up in what did it mean to be one. Only some combination of those answers could lead you to what it might mean to be an American.

Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. You've got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That's how they know you're not kidding.

Meaningless distraction drains you of the energy you should be placing into more serious things or using to simply enjoy the rewards of your labor.

The older you get, the more it means.

A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.

No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who's driving. I'd seen other great musicians lose their way and watch their music and art become anemic, rootless, displaced when they seemed to lose touch with who they were. My music would be a music of identity, a search for meaning and the future.

I told them I failed my draft physical. My dad, who often dismissively uttered the words "I can't wait 'til the army gets ahold of you," sat at the kitchen table, flicked the ash off of his cigarette, took a puff, slowly let the smoke escape from his lips and mumbled, "That's good.

Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation.

But to measure myself against life and death, as if I could go on forever.… There's no dignity in that. What are we to life? We're only sparks.

It is an objet gratuit. A work of artifice that demonstrates the bankruptcy of the quotidian.

We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame.

Looks like your sci-fi prediction came true right away, Xavier." "That can be gratifying," mused the novelist. "But not all the time."»

Say it clearly and you make it beautiful no matter what.

To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.

The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales' concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.

Freud's prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.