Quotes About Meaning

There must be an aesthetic besides death

We should not, therefore, try to get 'behind' the work, Barthes argues. There is nothing there. Instead, 'the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced' (and the metaphor suggests that the quest for intention generates a kind of violence). We should look at the text, Barthes urges, not through it. And his manifesto concludes with a ringing declaration: 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author'.

Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.

When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.

First was shock, second was apathy, and third was depersonalization and moral deformity. Frankl makes the point that only those who gave their life meaning did well. He points out that in every situation, there is always freedom of choice, even in extreme suffering.

Most white people enter therapy in order to gain better control of their lives, or as one healer put it, "to stickhandle through life." Indigenous healing is instead about connecting with the spirit world in a meaningful way and achieving harmony. Whereas

One of the ways unconscious drives sneak into the conscious mind is through dreams, with the unconscious material camouflaged by symbols. But Freud argues that if you interpret and free-associate to these symbols, it's possible to figure out what the unconscious is trying to impart. If the dream is too well camouflaged, the meaning may be lost; if it's not camouflaged enough, it will be a nightmare.

She was using a psychological technique called reframing: taking a concept and relabelling it so as to alter its meaning. She reframed what I perceived as neglect and labelled my concerns "overprotective.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.

The fact that you don't grasp the meaning of something doesn't mean it has none.

And then you notice the days are going by really fast. And they're all starting to look alike. And then you start to feel like this can't be it. This can't be all. This can't be . . . you know . . . a whole life. There has to be more.

Why the remarkable commitment?" "Why not?" Nathan asked. "What else have I done with my life that's remarkable?

The value of your life is

There's a time in the middle of our lives when we tend to have it under good control, but coming into the world and going out of the world, we're much more vulnerable. We need help. And being willing to be that help for someone is a very high calling, in my opinion. It's really the purest definition of the word serve.

Maybe everything deteriorates in time, and maybe that doesn't make it any less worth having while it lasts.

I think it makes not one bit of difference if those words came from the soul of Annaliese Schmidt or from the inside of my own brain. I think it only matters if the words are right.

What do you think of them?" "They're fine. Why ask them to be shorter?

Even if this was the only thing I ever did in my whole life, it would be worth having a life just to do this." We

I had all these hours that added up to all these days, and I look back and it seems my goal was mostly to make them go away. But that's not a proper life. That's not really living.

What I'm saying," he said, rising to a bit more anger now, his cheeks flushing slightly, "is that I'd like to know what good my life is to me." "The value of your life is your own choosing," Nathan said.

All men should strive to learn before they die What they are running from, and to, and why. —Thurber

I didn't sleep well that night. I lost most of the night thinking about it. What does it mean when someone loses the use of most of his brain, and it makes him more kind?

Biblical stories play an important role in the elementary child's search for answers. Coles found that children relate the experiences of biblical characters to the events of their own lives. As children think about these stories, they see themselves in the characters and see God working and relating to those biblical people. Certain stories grab children, inspire their imagination, and draw them to reflect on life, meaning, and God.

Can children grasp the full meaning of Christ's coming, death, and resurrection? Can we as adults? No, but awareness of the mystery draws us to explore, wonder, and discover more and more, year after year.