Quotes About Meaning

This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.

Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.

Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment.

If in the men who are supposed to be good they only see a virtue which is effectively less vital and less interesting than their own vices they will conclude that virtue has no meaning and will cling to what they have although they hate it.

We live as spiritual men when we live as men seeking God.

Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.

For language to have meaning there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him.

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.

It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world

We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

L'amore è il nostro vero destino. Non troviamo il significato della vita da soli, lo troviamo assieme a qualcun altro.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.

All theology is a kind of birthday Each one who is born Comes into the world as a question For which old answers Are not sufficient…

one's nationality should come to have a meaning in the light of eternity.

What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the mining of life by ourselfs alone- we find it with another

There is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage. Whatever may be the value of life in the world there have been, in all cultures, men who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude. (p. 10)

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.

The conscious mind is small and weak compared to the emotional and spiritual power that we call daimonic. It may be the urge to create, take risks, and love. Life may be simple when you avoid the daimon of love, but it is also less passionate and meaningful.