Quotes About Meaning

With a painful slice, I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretative loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meaning that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

Unfortunately this is not enough meaning or purpose for many persons who see in the approach of old age a mere diminution of life, and who look upon their earlier ideals only as something faded and worn out.

We shall not be digressing if we take this opportunity to try to grasp the psychological meaning of this rupture of the natural course of instinct, which is what the Christian process of sacrifice appears to be. From what has been said it follows that conversion signifies at the same time a transition to another attitude. This also makes it clear from what source the impelling motive for conversion comes, and how far Tertullian was right in conceiving the soul as naturaliter Christiana.

It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence" and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.

The name Mithras is related to Modern Persian mihr, meaning 'love' and 'sun.

There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone

The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol. If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. When the way enters death and we are surround by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word.

Nada os salva de lo desordenado y lo carente de sentido, pues ésta es la otra mitad del mundo.»

For that matter, does a thing or a fact ever mean anything in and of itself? We can only be sure that it is always the human being who interprets, that is, gives meaning to a fact. And that is the gist of the matter for psychology.

Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize.

The Lingam is certainly not an obscene allusion; nor is the cross merely a sign of death. Much depends upon the maturity of the dreamer who produces such an image.

The interpretation of dreams and symbols demands intelligence. It cannot be turned into a mechanical system and then crammed into unimaginative brains. It demands both an increasing knowledge of the dreamer's individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of the interpreter

To be a particle in a mass has meaning and charm only for the man who has not yet advanced to that stage, but none for the man who has experienced it to satiety. The importance of individual life may always be denied by the "educator" whose pride it is to breed mass-men. But any other person will sooner or later be driven to find this meaning for himself.

with the right attitude. In order to do so she would have had to recognize what fate demanded of her, and what was the meaning of the bizarre images that had broken in upon her consciousness.

A symbol does not disguise, it reveals in time.

For patients in this situation it is a positive life-saver when the doctor takes such products seriously and gives the patient access to the meanings they suggest. In this way he makes it possible for the patient to assimilate at least part of the unconscious and to repair the menacing dissociation by just that amount.

The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little.

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question...

Rhine's experiments confront us with the fact that there are events which are related to one another experimentally, and in this case meaningfully, without there being any possibility of proving that this relation is a causal one, since the "transmission" exhibits none of the known properties of energy.

That the highest summit of life can be expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact, for any growing beyond oneself means death.

That gives peace, when people feel that they are living [as] actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

La verdad suprema es una y la misma con lo contrario al sentido.

It's erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it's always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent.