Quotes About Meaning

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, fail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage

The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.

I'm not God. --Then find someone who is, man.

she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear 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 it really was, what it meant.

At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.

His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.

If Abir had not gone, she would not need to be remembered. Her absence, then, was her presence.

At forty-three, I bought my first house. I'd wanted one like crazy. A house meant family, a happy childhood for my litttle girl and for the little girl self inside me. . . . I was soon overwhelmed by the upkeep and overcome by the yardwork. . . . In the bright light of closing, it was obvious: it was never a house I wanted; it was what a house symbolized to me. (254)

The deep truths of a good story, especially fairy tales, cannot be revealed through discursive analysis—otherwise, why tell the story?

Le Silence est la Poésie même pour moi.

I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsiblity on the West Coast.

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

Man is originally characterized by his search for meaning rather than his search for himself. The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself .

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

The truth-that love is the highest goal to which man can aspire.