Quotes About Meaning

Words were only an approximation of meaning. The meaning escaped between the words, dissolved, disappeared, like fog fading away between iron bars.

LIFE'S MAJOR PURSUIT IS NOT KNOWING SELF . . . BUT KNOWING GOD. . . . UNLESS GOD IS THE MAJOR PURSUIT OF OUR LIVES, ALL OTHER PURSUITS ARE DEAD-END STREETS, INCLUDING TRYING TO KNOW OURSELVES.

Sometimes in your life you just meet someone or hear something that nudges you on the right path. And that becomes the best advice. It could just be a bit of commonsense said in a way that resonates with something in you. It's nothing new, but because it connects with you it holds meaning for you.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room. There is this complexity which seems to me to be part of the meaning of existence and everything we value.

Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.

I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don't want to do that. And why? I think something tells us that we should struggle. We don't really know why we should struggle, but we do, because we think it's better than sitting down and waiting for calamity.

Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten

As the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth-living.

She believed because it was that faith alone that gave her own life any kind of meaning.

THIS IS IMPORTANT REALLY A poem should never be longer than two lines. That was the first and this is the second.

Attention Morte. I have a question. Do you have a destiny? A purpose? Is Annah still wearing clothes? Affirmatory. Then the answer is yes.

words are just words. Some are better than others, but only because they are better at explaining what you mean.

Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.

God puts every one of us here for a purpose. There's some pull on our lives that draws us toward that purpose, and the farther we go away from it, the more unhappy we are. The closer we get, the more we yearn and desire it.

I mean, do you believe in God or what? " "Not the name-brand God they serve here." Tim said. "That old guy with the beard, granting wishes out of the clouds to whoever says the most rosaries. That's bullshit. I believe in everything.

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent.

The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest," Baldwin writes, "so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

I can rippity rap, lyrical miracle all day, but if you don't have a message behind it and you not saying nothing, it doesn't make sense.

I know, ultimately, I want to help effect change; otherwise, I would look at myself in the mirror every day and think, 'What in the world am I doing with my life?'

Art is supposed to hold up a mirror to its audience and ask, 'What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel?' and if you look at a painting and it makes you feel nothing, that's a feeling as well.

For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.

I think the job of art and drama is to hold a mirror up to those things and say, 'What do you think about it?'

I love when people mirror themselves in my music, and I think that's the whole point of it - not telling people what it is or how they're supposed to feel... but you having a relationship with my song makes it real to me.