Quotes About Meaning

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the human beings who proclaim it and in which it lives. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of humankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean very little: They are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.

Religion that is confined to the sanctuary is worse than no religion at all, for it is false.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.

Gods are just stories now. Bar said that's all they really were anyway: stories to make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of them, rather than cut their own way.

Do you suppose the human race invented boredom to make the prospect of death more palatable?

Language is the charnel house of man.

Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert.

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer.

Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.

A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.

The serious problems in life...are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.