Quotes About Meaning

A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not yet discovered what life means for him

Meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything.

the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and import our age has not yet begun to comprehend.

man does not stand forever, his nullification. they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

Nevroz, anlam?n? arayan ruhun ac? çekmesidir.

the way art can become, eventually, all we have of what was true.

Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?

When I can relax, and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought processes. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way. At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger.

You can't possibly be afraid of death, really, you can only be afraid of life.

So, here we are, all of us poor bewildered darlings, wandering adrift in a universe too big and too complex for us, clasping and ricochetting off other people too different and too perplexing for us, and seeking to satisfy myriad, shifting, vague needs and desires, both mean and exalted. And sometimes we mesh. Don't we? - Attributed to James Flynn, Ph.D.

another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.

letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.

I have come to recognize that the reason I devote myself to research, and to the building of theory, is to satisfy a need for perceiving order and meaning, a subjective need which exists in me.

To understand another person's thoughts and feelings thoroughly, with the meanings they have for him, and to be thoroughly understood by this other person in return -- this is one of the most rewarding of human experiences, and all too rare.

There is no doubt that I am selective in my listening, hence "directive" if people wish to accuse me of this. I am centered in the group member who is speaking, and am unquestionably much less interested in the details of his quarrel with his wife, or of his difficulties on the job, or his disagreement with what has just been said, than in the meaning these experience have for him now and the feeling they arouse in him. It is to these meanings and feelings that I try to respond.

During the process of therapy the individual comes to ask himself, in regard to ever-widening areas of his life-space, "How do I experience this?" "What does it mean to me?" "If I behave in a certain way how do I symbolize the meaning which it will have for me?" He comes to act on a basis of what may be termed realism—a realistic balancing of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions which any action will bring to himself.

the best financial plan has nothing to do with what the markets are doing, nothing to do with what your real estate agent is telling you, nothing to do with the hot stock your brother-in-law told you about. It has everything to do with what's most important to you.

One note is not music. It is what lies between the notes that makes the music. And what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, "What is the meaning of life?" is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, "Where is the meaning in life?" The place to look is: between.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Hirsute? What does that mean?' 'Hair, you ninny, hair!

Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.

PRINCIPLE is likewise such a law for action, except that it has not the formal definite meaning, but is only the spirit and sense of law in order to leave the judgment more freedom of application when the diversity of the real world cannot be laid hold of under the definite form of a law.

God's love is unspeakable, implacable, its gaze matter-of-fact. But human love is something else: We love in excess of God's love if we love at all. We love by heaping meaning on objective fact. If I believed in God, I might imagine this is what He created humans for, to give things more tenderness than He granted them, amid nature's unblinking harshness and the cruelty of fate...

The question of when life begins is answered according to the purposes for which we ask it.