Quotes About Meaning

In the Old Testament the Rose of Sharon is just budding, but in the New Testament it is in full bloom. The whole Bible is all about Jesus.

When the Roman governor Pilate asked Jesus "What is truth?" nearly 2,000 years ago, he didn't wait for Jesus to respond.

Without an objective standard of meaning and morality, then life is meaningless and there's nothing absolutely right or wrong. Everything is merely a matter of opinion.

On the other hand, if there is no God, then your life ultimately means nothing. Since there is no enduring purpose to life, there's no right or wrong way to live it. And it doesn't matter how you live or what you believe—your destiny is dust.

You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.' Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.

time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.

It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word "coincidence" exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning.

What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.

What music means is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.

It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most.

I never feel weird about being the main character in the nontransferable, nonexistent movie of my life. That's totally fine. What makes me nervous is a growing suspicion that this movie is fucked up and devoid of meaning. The auteur is a nihilist.

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

Every night, we're all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one's teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we've stopped trying to figure out what they mean.

The concept of "selling out"—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.

So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix : In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning.

The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that's almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.

But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What's the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality? With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don't think there is one.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them. I

A book become popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For the true obsessive, whatever an author doesn't explicitly explain ends up becoming everything that matters most (and since it's inevitably the obsessives who keep art alive, they make the rules).

Something that's only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.