Quotes About Meaning

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

Where am I? Where am I in relation to God, to myself, and to others? These are the basic questions of human life.

To you I speak with much hesitation about suffering. . . . But there is an introduction to suffering which comes with the birthpains of Love. And in such suffering one finds for the first time how deep and profound is the nature and meaning of life. And in such suffering one sees, as if one's eye were newly opened upon a blinding light, . . . And there too is suffering, but there, above all, is peace and victory.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

The truth about stories is, that's all we are.

The truth about stories is that that's all we are.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition.

And cranky old Jacques Derrida notwithstanding, we do love our dichotomies.

There is in fact no Greek equivalent to our barren term 'sex.' This English word in its present usage emerged only in the nineteenth century, out of clinical discourse. Greeks spoke of what we now call 'sex' by referring to gods - Eros and Aphrodite.

the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.

In Catcher in the Rye , the protagonist Holden Caulfield mentions reading books that make him wish he could be friends with the author and be able to call him on the phone and so forth. I would consider a literary work that made someone feel this way a success. Furthermore, it's the only kind of success in literature that means anything to me.

Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?

From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards into life.

Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die.

When you're on your last legs, whether you're confined to a bed or screaming in a crashed-up car, many things may occur to you. Something that won't occur to you, either confined to a bed or screaming, is that it doesn't matter what you did or didn't do during your existence.

To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery.

Consciousness makes it seem as if (1) there is something to do; (2) there is somewhere to go; (3) there is something to be; (4) there is someone to know.

The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions-- only those who do it well and those who don't. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment.

I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions---only those who do it well and those who don't.