Quotes About Meaning

the way we always speak with modest words, we never use clear and urgent words, our words are gray, harmless, floating, and useless

it seems desperately attractive to be unrooted and breathing nothing but your own solitude

Il romanzo è fra le cose del mondo che sono insieme inutili e necessarie.

NÄ—ra gyvenimo be mirties. Taigi mes negalime sakyti, kad gyvename. Mes tiesiog 'esame'...

People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world.

You have made my life better by just simply existing.

What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.

In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother's death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.

And they talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading and kneading them, continually rolling between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had extracted from their lives (what they called "life," their domain), kneading it, pulling it, rolling it until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little gray pellet.

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, whereas her order was not.

The tragic irony of people's lives (this point can hardly be stressed enough) is that the very attempt to deny aloneness results in denying love. Without an 'I' who loves, what is the meaning of love?

My happiness and self-realization are noble purposes.

There is perhaps nothing more important to know about children than that they need to make sense out of their experience.

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.

Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.

That old woman taught me my catechism! said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words.

These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable, or otherwise, on those entitled to bear them. In the present—and still more in the future condition of society—they imply, not privilege, but restriction.

Poichè il destino e gli eventi li avevano tenuti per tanto tempo separati, occorrevva che qualche cosa di lieve e come indifferente corresse avanti ad aprire le porte dell'anima a parole più gravi, suggerite da più gravi pensieri.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. […] A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.

All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them.

Our gods did not come to us in any specific form, but we held them in our hearts and understood them in our own way.

The way I see it, it's got nothing to do with all of that. It has to do with love...A person don't got a soul until that person is loved. If a mother loves her baby-- wants her baby--it's got a soul from the moment she knows it's there. The moment you're loved, that's when you got your soul. --Diego

How ironic, then, and how poetic, that humankind may have created the Creator out of want for one. Man creates God, who then creates man. Is that not the perfect circle of life? But then, if that turns out to be the case, who is created in whose image?