Quotes About Meaning

This is the true joy in life — being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

This is the true joy in life -- being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one...

Meow" means "woof" in cat.

For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness... ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.

I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life.

Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.

Where does meaning come in? If everything is assigned a number, does this diminish the meaning in the world? What Gödel (and Turing) proved is that formal systems will, sooner or later, produce meaningful statements whose truth can be proved only outside the system itself. This limitation does not confine us to a world with any less meaning. It proves, on the contrary, that we live in a world where higher meaning exists.

A successful interpretive language both tolerates ambiguity and takes advantage of it. "A language which has maximum compression would actually be completely unsuited to conveying information beyond a certain degree of complexity, because you could never find out whether a text is right or wrong," von Neumann explained

The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths.

The teachings of the Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Gospels, eternal life in John, justification and the life in Christ in Paul, the heavenly High Priest in Hebrews, and the Lamb who is a Lion and a conquering Son of Man in the Revelation are diverse ways of describing various aspects and depths of meaning embodied in the one great redemptive event — the person and work of Jesus Christ.

But "it is almost universally agreed that the word justify (dikaio?) does not mean 'make righteous.'"21 Rather, it designates the status — the relationship of righteousness.

The Logos was with (pros) God, and the Word was God (theos Ä"n ho logos). The Greek words express two ideas: the Word was deity, but the Word was not fully identical with deity. The definite article is used only with logos. If John had used the definite article also with theos, he would have said that all that God is, the Logos is: an exclusive identity. As it is, he says that all the Word is, God is; but he implies that God is more than the Word.

Therefore, when Paul proclaimed the eschatological meaning of Jesus' death, resurrection, and exaltation, he was proclaiming all that Jesus' life, deeds, and words had meant, and far more. His relative silence about Jesus reflects neither historical nor theological disinterest in Jesus, but only the actual situation in the unfolding of redemptive history. All that Jesus in history had meant was included, and enlarged, in the preaching of the exalted one.

We conclude that the "blood" in separation from the flesh does not mean life but death, life surrendered in sacrifice.18

Against the background of the meaning of "lost," one can approve of the decision of Arndt, Gingrich, and Danker, following Bauer, to list "lost" in Luke 19:10 under the meaning "perish, die."16 The lost have not only gone astray but are in danger of perishing unless rescued.

History always tries to understand the meaning of the events it reports; and the fact that a person has a viewpoint does not mean that person is a poor historian and distorts facts to support his or her interpretation.

However, the word translated "begotten" comes from genos, meaning "kind" or "sort," not from genna?, "to beget." At the least, John means to say that Jesus is the only one of his class.

We cannot therefore speak of a Pauline theology as an abstract, theoretical, speculative system; but we can recognize a Pauline theology as an interpretation of the meaning of the person and work of Christ in its practical relevance for Christian life, both individual and collective.

The gospel is, therefore, the proclamation of the historical fact and the redemptive meaning of the cross, which includes both present and future blessings.

Revelation, then, is the totality of the historical event of Jesus Christ plus the apostolic interpretation of the divine meaning of the event — the apostolic interpretation being itself a part of the event.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

It is in those acts which we call trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted.