Quotes About Meaning

Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

Art-speech is the only truth.

What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when one only learned it in order to answer examination questione, in order that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, every- thing was debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things, to encumber material life.

Do you think one can only care once?' she asked. 'Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don't know what it means. Nor men either. But when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day.

And what then? What did life offer apart from the care of money? Nothing.

Kad biste im mogli samo dokazati da živjeti i trošiti nije jedno te isto!

There is love, and it is a deep thing, but there are deeper things than love. — D.H. Lawrence

The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.

What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when one only learned it in order to answer examination questions, in order that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things, to encumber material life.

After a short time, she was not very much interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of something, which was not just being good, and doing one's best. No, she wanted something else: something that was not her ready-made duty. Everything seemed to be merely a matter of social duty, and never of her self. They talked about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or implicate her soul. As yet her soul was not brought in at all.

Clarifying the Way means that we determine the point we should aim at throughout our lives, based on the self that is only the self and life that is only life. This is the sole great matter, and this is what completing the sole great matter of one's life means. True practice begins at this point.

Uchiyama R?shi subtitled his interpretive translation and commentary of this important work Finsei Ry?ri no Hon, or How to Cook Your Life. The word ry?ri, the meaning of which to be sure includes the cooking and preparation of food, also has broader connotations. Ry?ri may also be used in the sense of conducting or handling one's affairs. The implication of this title is that the author tells us how we should go about conducting our lives and treating everything

If you try to examine your life analytically, asking yourself who you are, finally you will realize that there is something you cannot reach. You don't know what it is, but you feel the presence of something you want to connect with. This is sometimes called the absolute. Buddha and Dogen Zenji say true self. Christians say God.

If we do not understand the significance of our presence, we can never give anyone the present of our lives.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal,--not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

having only learned to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies--my only talent--smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle...

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.