Quotes About Meaning

Like doesn't mean the same as: it means your mind goes in that direction and casts about among present possibilities like a hunting dog--or like a light from a flashlight...

Speechwriter Barton Swaim cheerfully explains why the opaque may be a virtue. "Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language," he writes, "is not the same as lying: it's not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you're saying something instead of nothing.

Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once there was credit in facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. The prepositions add nothing of significance.

too much explanation can take the pleasure out of any poetry. (Preface, vii)

good haiku are full of overtones. The elusiveness that is one of their chief charms comes, not from haziness, but from the fact that so much suggestion is put into so few words. (Characteristics of Haiku, p. 4)

1) He must be competent, (2) he must exercise good judgment, and (3) he must have character. By itself, competence is meaningless without character and good judgment. If

Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.

Saya percaya bahwa orang bukannya takut mati. Mereka takut sesuatu yang lain. Sesuatu yang lebih menggelisahkan dan lebih tragis daripada maut itu sendiri. Kita takut tidak pernah hidup, menjelang akhir hayat kita dengan perasaan bahwa kita tidak pernah benar-benar hidup. Bahwa kita tidak pernah memahami, untuk apa kehidupan kita itu.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense. Characters become more fully developed and the meaning of earlier incidents begins to become clear. And when we to the end, there is a satisfying sense of completeness to it.

Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be…to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all…no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.

The Bible is not a book of science, but it is a book that has scientific implications, and when science is properly understood, it supports the Bible.

If we want our worship, or attempts at worship, to mean anything, we have to strive to conform it to the nature and will of God, and not to the mood or taste of the century.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.

We totally misunderstand what it means to be alive when we think of our lives as time we can use in search of rewards and pleasure. Frantically and in growing frustration, we search through our days, our years, looking for the reward, for the success that will make our lives worthwhile, like the security guard looking through the trash in the wheelbarrow for something of value and all the while missing the obvious answer. When you have learned how to live, life itself is the reward.

That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.

If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person's life has made a difference.

Para mim, a vida é como um bom livro. Quanto mais avançamos nele, mais sentido começa a fazer.

The task of religion is not to teach us to bow our heads and accept God's inscrutable will. It is to help us find the resources to live meaningfully and to go on believing, even in a world where people often don't get what they deserve.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.

Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can't feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, "Why do we have to feel pain?" to "What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?

Een boek bestaat alleen uit woorden. En dat is het prachtige ervan. Het is misschien niet gemaakt van de stof waarvan dromen gemaakt zijn, maar wel van iets dat er vlak naast gelegen heeft.

My dear cousin, can you be satisfied with such a way of spending your probation?