Quotes About Meaning

Archbishop Tutu once explained to me that suffering can either embitter us or ennoble us, and it tends to ennoble us if we are able to make meaning out of our suffering and use it for the benefit of others.

Without meaning, life is empty and day will follow day, month will follow month

And a sense of meaning is so important for hope and happiness, isn't it?" I asked. "It is," Jane replied. "Without meaning, life is empty and day will follow day, month will follow month, and year will follow year in mindless succession." "Those," I reflected, "are the people who have lost hope.

I think humanity at least has a shared understanding of what justice means.

Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.

But we also need, among other things, to abandon conventional planning ideas about city neighborhoods. The 'ideal' neighborhood of planning and zoning theory, too large in scale to possess any competence or meaning as a street neighborhood, is at the same time too small in scale to operate as a district. It is unfit for anything. It will not serve as even a point of departure. Like the belief in medical bloodletting, it was a wrong turn in the search for understanding.

No person dies without a reason.2 You are not taught that, however, so people do not recognize their own reasons for dying, and they are not taught to recognize their own reasons for living — because you are told that life itself is an accident in a cosmic game of chance.

I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day's work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved. What were we meant for then? To love the whole damned world.

She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.

contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.

Don't you want to know what happened?" Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, "No, I don't, because I don't want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you're gonna want to tell it, so don't bother.

eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to

It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.

How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink? Which did not mean

Art is a kind of mining, he said. The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.

I don't know what I mean, but I know I believe it.

Any work of art, said her grandfather,must achieve sainthood before we set it free to roam in the world.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

As Mama once told me, "We called him Boy for the first two months of his life, but when his third-month birthday came around and we saw that sweet smile—especially when you were close to him, reaching out for him—we realized that he had chosen life. So we named him Chaim after your zaide, your grandfather, but also because 'chaim' in Hebrew means 'life.'" I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without my twin.

That might work, I said. I'm good at faking it. This led to a couple moments of uncomfortable silence from both of us. You didn't mean... ? Morelli asked. No. Of course not. Never? Maybe once. His eyes narrowed. Once? It's all that comes to mind. It was the time we were late for your Uncle Spud's birthday party. I remember that. That was great. You're telling me you faked it? We were late! I couldn't concentrate. It seemed like the best way to go.

How we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected or do things merely co-occur? It's all in how you think.

total sense, but it was as

I give people gift cards," Lula said. "You could buy them in the supermarket. They're easy. There's gift cards for everything from Starbucks to Target and in between. I like them on account of the message they send. I figure it puts people on notice. A gift card says I feel obligated to get you something, but I don't care enough to put any effort into finding just the right gift. Gives people some idea of their place in your life, you see what I'm saying?

You're his what?" "Amanuensis.