Quotes About Meaning

Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

For Greek thought this was impossible since the essence of perfection is changelessness, and perfection cannot arise from the changes of human history. By contrast the Old Testament writers look forward to a glorious and terrible consummation of history. History has meaning in the sense that it has a goal.

If I do not know the purpose for which human life was designed, I have no basis for saying that any kind of human life-style is good or bad.

It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian? The

The modern antithesis of observation and reason on the one hand versus revelation and faith on the other is only tenable on the basis of a prior decision that the whole cosmic and human story has no purpose and therefore no meaning. It

the business of the missionary, and the business of the Christian Church in any situation, is to challenge the plausibility structure in the light of God's revelation of the real meaning of history.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.

If there's nothing more poisonous than bigotry, there's nothing more pathetic than liberal guilt.

the historian treats ideas seriously and does not regard them as completely subservient to events and possessing no life of their own (for in that case there would be no point in studying them), but he does not believe that they can endure from one generation to another without some change of meaning.

Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought—to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning.

Mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be ex-communicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.

Mniej o prawdÄ™ przy tym chodzi, jak o ducha prawdy, nikt bowiem nie mo?e obieca?, ?e nie bÄ™dzie siÄ™ myliÅ', mo?e jednak przechowywa? ducha prawdy równie? w pomyÅ'kach, czyli nie wyrzeka? siÄ™ czujnej nieufnoÅ›ci do wÅ'asnych sÅ'ów.

we really have no right to reproach God for having created the world. For Him it was the only possible way of escaping from the accursed void in which He found himself.

'Tis a strange mystery, the power of words! Life is in them, and death. A word can send The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek. Hurrying with many meanings; or can turn The current cold and deadly to the heart. Anger and fear are in them; grief and joy Are on their sound; yet slight, impalpable:-- A word is but a breath of passing air.

That's what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child's game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn't matter. Death didn't respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

Sure, but real life's not actually like that," Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. "You don't just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You're not going to be a character in a story, there's nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn't work like that.

You don't have to do anything. This is what you don't understand! You don't know any older magicians except our professors. It's a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. A lot of magicians never find it.

Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.

Wait a minute," Quentin said. "Who or what is the Thames dragon?" "The Thames dragon," Eliot said. "You know. The dragon who lives in the Thames.

That's it?" "That's it. And then you jump in. It's all just tradition. I mean,

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective. Something like that. Or otherwise what was the point?