Quotes About Meaning

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives.

What this requires of us is that we don't get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what's happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about.

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck

I'd loved books in my regular, pre- PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I'd always tell myself, though I didn't know the meaning of it just yet.

With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.

But Cheryl wasn't just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn't some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters—every sin, every regret, every affliction.

Podría interesarte saber, por ejemplo, que la palabra «prestigioso» deriva del término latino prestigiae, que significa «truco de prestidigitación». ¿No te parece interesante? La utilizamos para referirnos a lo honorable y lo valorado, pero esta palabra remite a la ilusión, el engaño, a las falsas impresiones.

Your sense of despair about the meaning of your work sustains itself only if you believe the narrowest version of the story—the one that assumes your contribution to the greater good can be measured by only one result.

Or rather, it's a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all.

In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it's a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.

Your sense of despair about the meaning of your work sustains itself only if you believe the narrowest version of the story—the one that assumes your contribution to the greater good can be measured by only one result. But it can't. You know that.

I believe there is something bigger than our individual selves that we can touch when we live our lives with integrity, compassion, and love.

Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice.

Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.

There's a saying about drug addicts that they stop maturing emotionally at the age they start using, and I've known enough addicts to believe this to be true enough. I think the same thing can happen in longtime monogamy. Perhaps some of your limited interpretations about what it means to say the word "love" are left over from what you thought it meant all those years ago...

I want your lives to have purpose & passion. I wish to meet all of you so I can tell you how much I love all of you.

Who cares if one more light goes out? In a sky of a million stars It flickers, flickers

When I am king, annual birthdays will be banned and we will instead celebrate birthdays once every five years. With such large delays in birthday celebrations, maybe we can bring ourselves to actually care when someone has one.

Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that the human mind delights in finding pattern — so much so that we often mistake coincidence . . . for profound meaning.

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight." William James

What you say matters, not the language

The words you choose to say something are just as important as the decision to speak.