Quotes About Meaning

The moment I realized that God existed, I knew that I could not do otherwise than to live for him alone . . . Faith strips the mask from the world and reveals God in everything. It makes nothing impossible and renders meaningless such words as anxiety, danger, and fear, so that the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy- like a child, hand in hand with his mother.

How a word more or less, an idea omitted or added, a syllable misplaced, can transform a whole sentence and make what was before harmless, really shocking!

happiness comes from doing great things-rather than getting great things

The man had asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat? Monroe's answer had been, For the atmosphere.

One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.

every act, object and statement that man perceives is meaningful (even "nothing") and […] the frontiers of meaning are always, momentarily, in state of collapse and paradox.

semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of "meaning" as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

When I walk the fields I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.

I don't envy the mule his labyrinthine inlets, those indispensable side-intelligencers.

the truth was that I had become a secret agent because I could not bear for another minute the pointlessness of life in the real world.

We all give meaning to each other's lives. As long as we live.

John could have intended a double meaning. In the end, darkness was not able to suppress the Light even by placing the Light in a tomb. However

Now that Christ has come, belief or unbelief is no longer a crisis of the intellect (if it ever was); it is a

As Os Guinness writes, To be sure, calling is not what it is commonly thought to be. It has to be dug out from under the rubble of ignorance and confusion. And, uncomfortably, it often flies in the face of our human inclinations. But nothing short of God's call can ground and fulfill the truest human desire for purpose.3

What is stripped away is not our humanity but our idolatries, not faith but our false hopes, not meaning but out illusions. Dying in order to live.

And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard.

In our tongue we would say alfär.

Because it's a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't story-telling what being human is all about?

my middle names aren't Oliver and Francis.

The specific medicine for the shock of despair is the deeper shock of meaning.

My children are puppies. The police officer quickly figured out that I was trying to say that my children were lost. He was kind but not overly concerned.

I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with math. I don't like numbers for the sake of numbers. I am not impressed by fancy formulas that have no real-world application. I particularly disliked high school calculus for the simple reason that no one ever bothered to tell me why I needed to learn it. What is the area beneath a parabola? Who cares?

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this.

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.