Quotes About Meaning

The reason for a woman's life," said Sarai, "is the same as the reason for a man's—so that she might have joy.

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others

With gay marriage, the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.

There's a longer view, in which life and death are less important matters than choosing what kind of life and what kind of death we have.

don't even know why I do what I do. How can I know what other people's true purposes are? There's no hope

He understood all the words, he just had no clue what was going on. The Aunts said what they meant. Or at least they meant what they said.

If our happiness is the purpose of God," said Alai, "why are so few of us happy?

Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they're telling the truth, there's always something hidden behind those words.

Life is how God gives purpose to the universe.

Their explanations might have been completely legitimate, or they might have been sesquipedalian bushwa.

No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.

La felicidad puede depender tan fácilmente de las cosas útiles como de las inútiles.

So you choose to measure by the only standard that allows your life to be meaningless?

Cambiar al mundo es bueno para aquellos que quieren su nombre en los libros. Pero ser feliz... eso es para aquellos que escriben sus nombres en las vidas de los demás y retienen los corazones de otros como el tesoro más preciado.

Yet if he lost that desire, who would he be ? What would be in his heart then, if she were gone from it ?

gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Does this feel like heaven? She asked. He laughed, and not nicely. Well, then, you can't be dead. You forget, he said. This could easily be hell.

If the purpose of life was just to continue into the future, then none of it would have meaning, because it would be all anticipation and preparation. There's fruition, Grego. There's the happiness we've already had. The happiness of each moment. The end of our lives, even if there's no forward continuation, no progeny at all, the end of our lives doesn't erase the beginning.

Still, it's better to believe that some high purpose guides our steps than to think that nothing matters except our own small miseries and happinesses. - Alai pg.216

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them;once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

All art is quite useless.