Quotes About Meaning

extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

As the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya expands in his modern interpretation of the Ethics, if your life consists only of actions whose "worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve," you're vulnerable to the existential despair that blooms in response to the inevitable question, Is this all there is to life?

The thesis of this final chapter in part one therefore is that "a deep life is not just economically lucrative but also a life well lived

a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

if your life consists only of actions whose "worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve," you're vulnerable to the existential despair that blooms in response to the inevitable question, Is this all there is to life? One solution to this despair, he notes, is to follow Aristotle's lead and embrace pursuits that provide you a "source of inward joy.

But this doesn't matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

The best of sermons have never been a belch of information or piety.

Prayer is like any other kind of communication. There are times when meaning is shared, but there is no real excitement. At other times, though, the mood is so pregnant with joy it's impossible to forget.

Oh, I'm a breather, I'm a respirateur, isn't that enough?" He asked, "Why do people have to work? Why do people think they have to work?" He

L'universo esprimerà se stesso fin tanto che qualcuno potrà dire "io leggo dunque esso scrive

Everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in another sense.

Whatever the story means in the story which I told you, the fact of thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings as something separate from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses. Rather, if the world be connected, if I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of red wood forests and sea anemones... -Vít Pokorný

But this child is not worth unraveling the world for. No one is.

If what we are called is not important, why bother with a name at all?

So maybe I wasn't that high profile when I was a student here," I said. "But am I really more interesting dead than alive?" "You don't seriously expect me to answer that, do you?" Elaine said.

Death was a state of being, just like life. Why should one be better than the other?

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.

everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.

So much of medicine is translation disguised as insight. You tell the doctor what's wrong with you in English and she tells you back in Greek, as the joke goes. Which is not to say that words can't taste like medicine. Placebo, in Latin, means "I shall be pleasing.

Colonel Moore once asked me if I was prepared to die, and, in looking back, I was. What I wasn't properly prepared for was to live-

Seek dharma, child. Find out how you fit in, who you are. Remember that everything around you has a purpose. Even you, child.

I don't know if it becomes literature...I just know the two added words cause me to look at the ordinary sentences differently. And quite honestly, I find that to be magical!