Quotes About Meaning

If it were a question of excuses and consolation, I would have preferred to melt away like smoke.

If one accepted such reasoning, I who had lost my face was destined to be shut up forever in a solitary cell … with no roadway … and so a mask became invested with a terribly profound meaning.

isn't the mask something required mainly by the victim and the disguise, on the contrary, by the assailant?

For me, whatever you may say, you are the most important "other person." No, I do not mean it in a negative sense. I mean that the one who must first restore the roadway, the one whose name I had to write on the first letter, was first on my list of "others." (Under any circumstances, I simply did not want to lose you. To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world.)

In actual fact I did not perform a single real act but simply went round in circles writing these notes.

Ir nors kartojimasis neišvengiamas gyvenime kaip širdies plakimas, bet juk širdies plakimas - dar ne visas gyvenimas.

But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand doesn't it?

Mistletoe, said Kian, leading me to a spot in the center of the garden. He kissed me softly. I hear it means something in your world.

Art is purposiveness without purpose.

We are meaning-seeking creatures.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.

pre-Islamic period jahiliyyah, which is usually translated as "the time of ignorance." But the primary meaning of the root JHL is "irascibility"—an acute sensitivity to honor and prestige, excessive arrogance, and, above all, a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation.4

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.

In very early religion, therefore, creativity was seen as divine: we still use religious language to speak of creative "inspiration" which shapes reality anew and brings fresh meaning to the world.

Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.

Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done.

instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

The texts emphasize that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally. They had nothing to do with ordinary logic or events in this world, but were merely symbols of a more elusive truth.

Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.

We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our

Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair.

represented a universal striving for fulfillment.

De rabbijnen wezen er graag op dat koning Salomo ter verklaring van elk vers van de Tora 3000 gelijkenissen gebruikte en dat hij van elke gelijkenis 1005 interpretaties kon geven. Dit betekende dat er 3 015 000 verklaringen waren voor elk stukje tekst. Een tekst die niet radicaal geherinterpreteerd kon worden om de actuele behoeften te bevredigen was dan ook dood.