Quotes About Meaning

The best of the old stories spoke to the listener because they spoke not just to the ears but to the heart as well.

Fully understanding spoils the story — the best are always translucent.

Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.

I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life. It gives meaning and self-esteem to people who are parents. It gives a role model to children.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. It is no season in which to wander the world as if one were the wind blowing aimlessly along the streets without a place to rest, without food, and without time meaning anything to one, just as time means nothing to the wind.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought."

[I]t behooves us as true Americans to enter the splendid new movement which is endeavoring to make the Fourth over from a day of shallow jingoism and unmeaning brutality and carnage into a day of initiation into the meaning of true citizenship and a festival of deep and genuine and beautiful patriotism.

A struggle to do something more than exist is the sign of human life — the mission of the human soul.

...not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people — a black people — who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.

[W]ell I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age- when you are going through something like that – the genre is so meaningful.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

Many works would be senseless, real junk, but for the fact that, being art, they are exhibited because they have a message of almost religious importance, interpreting man and his world - yes, perhaps even as junk.

But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God.

The Egyptian word Pir-em-us meant to them something of great vertical height. From this the Greek form Pyramis, or the plural Pyramides was formed.

To maximize return on investment is an inadequate statement of purpose. It fails to accomplish the paramount responsibility of leadership—to provide meaning and inspiration to those who are expected to follow. The mass of people within our corporations are not primarily motivated by maximizing private gain. Many firms are structured as if they were….

She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement—the art of living.