Quotes About Meaning

this was how young boys made amends. Without words, with spare gestures that, in their rarity, acquired all the necessary significance.

It is my feeling,' she said, haltingly, 'that a faith that delivers perfect answers to every question is not a true faith, for its only purpose is to satisfy, to ease the mind and so end its questing.

One can find precious value in brevity

Some people don't go through their lives searching, Smiles. I'm not looking, because I'm not expecting to find anything. You want meaning? Make it up. You want truth? Invent it. Makes no difference, to anything. Sun comes up, sun goes down. We see one, maybe we don't see the other, but the sun doesn't care, does it?

I am the... the Shield Anvil. This is for me... to hold... hold on. Reach - gods! Redeem them, sir! It is your task. The heart of your vows - you are the walker among the deads in the field of battle, you are the bringer of peace, the redeemer of the fallen. You are the mender of broken lives. Without you, death is senseless, and the denial of meaning is the world's greatest crime to its own children.

Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on. She wondered if the gift of revelation—of discovering the meaning underlying humanity—offered nothing more than a devastating sense of futility.

We distort with deliberate purpose; we confine vast meaning into the strictures of imagined necessity. In this lies both failing and gift, for in the surrender of truth we fashion, rightly or wrongly, universal significance. Specific gives way to general; detail gives way to grandiose form, and in the telling we are exalted beyond our mundane selves.

If all existence is a dialogue, how is it there is still so much left unsaid?

since nothing else made sense.

Rush to death. The longer one lives, the less valued is that life. What is that?

T]he real meaning of 'tradition' was ... 'stupidity on purpose.

An unending suicide note cannot but be a proclamation on the worth of living.

Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering. Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them. Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.

There is much to be cynical about—and it is a good answer if there has not been an incarnation. But if that has happened, if the Word did become flesh, and if there are men and women who in and through their own vocations imitate the vocation of God, then sometimes and in some places the world becomes something more like the way it ought to be.

I'd always suspected that the Bill of Rights occasionally had a "liberal" interpretation.

You keep saying that. I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

If it's right, it means the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is not 42, with apologies to fans of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But Deep Thought was on the right track: the secret of the universe is indeed mathematical.

Without a story there is no meaning. And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story. To understand this is to understand the true power of stories. And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling... Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?

and I'm thinking as our bodies meet that I'll remember this forever, and i just hope it's for all the right reasons.

Two Arts degrees does not a life make.

I work hard in the orchard, not for the money anymore, but for something I can't explain. Something worth more than money.

T]hink about culture as the collective manifestation of value—where value is that which is valuable to "sufficiently complex" agents, from which meaning, purpose, ethics, and aesthetics can be derived.

Although the past really happened—in the same way that the world is indeed out there—history is something we make.