Quotes About Meaning

the spirit has its homeland, which is the realm of the meaning of things. Saint-Exupéry The Wisdom of the Sands

Is that the moral of it all, he thought? the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them?

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving of mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

Man lives and evolves by 'eating' significance, as a child eats food. The deeper his sense of wonder, the wider his curiosity, the stronger his vitality becomes, and the more powerful his grip on his own existence.

Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the 'triviality of everydayness', if he is to do anything worthwhile.

I think everyone should love life above everything else in the world,' Alyosha tells him. 'Love life regardless of the meaning of it?' 'Certainly—it must be regardless of logic—'it's only then one can understand its meaning.

I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose.

You might say that the scientist is nothing more than a glorified accident-investigator. And the accident-investigator is himself the product of accident. But man is more deeply moved by meaning than by accident.

if I lost faith in the order of things, if I were convinced that everything is a disorderly, damnable, devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusion—still I should want to live.

If I examine a painting through a microscope I shall learn about the texture of the paint, but nothing about the artists intention in painting the picture

It didn't make no sense until it made the only sense.

No matter that Mr. Marconi had told him he didn't care, no matter that Elwood had never said a word to his friends when they stole in his presence. It didn't make no sense until it made the only sense.

Nie chodzi tylko o to, ?eby przetrwa?, ale aby ?y?.

brought down the roof of the doghouse, and a squeal from the dog, who had just had his tail

The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where be broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become.

Johnny Dandy starring Blake Headley and Patricia De Hammond had been running on Broadway at the Divinity Theater since Memorial Day weekend. Critics had meted their blows and yet. The dialogue and action were so shrouded in euphemism, so opaque in meaning and intention, alternately dull and

There was a message there, if he could teach himself the language.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

The overexamined life... It's not worth living.

If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?