Quotes About Meaning

St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint.

God is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of God. Music is a language more profound than words. How often have you heard a great piece of music and felt that? Great music does not just make you feel good; great music suggests some profound truth or mysterious meaning that is objectively true but not translatable into words.

We make a big deal out of Christmas; we should make an even bigger deal out of March 25. The greatest event in history, the Incarnation, happened at the Annunciation, not the Nativity.

The true philosopher lives his life as a dress rehearsal for death.

The deepest healing is the healing of the deepest wound. The deepest wound is the frustration of the deepest need. The deepest need is the need for meaning, purpose, and hope.

life is a quest for love and a quest for god, and there is no car or plane for this trip. it is an old-fashioned quest made on our own two feet.

To exercise what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy called a right that is "at the heart of liberty"— namely, the right to determine for oneself the meaning of life and the mystery of human existence—is to tell God, "Get off my throne.

He came. That is the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet through our heads. He came.

Live a life of love, especially the love of God, and observe the joy of it. Live a life of lovelessness and observe the joylessness of it.

What we do in our parishes and homes contributes to what Christ is doing: preparing the Second Coming. That is the final meaning of our daily work.

Yes, organized religion is a crutch. You mean you didn't know that you are a cripple? If you don't know that, then you are a very serious cripple indeed, mentally and spiritually.

Expect the world to be Heaven, and it will feel like Hell. Expect it to be Purgatory, and it will feel like Heaven. The two most salient facts about Purgatory are pain and hope, suffering and meaning.

The ancient Greeks named about five hundred gods, the Romans five thousand, the Tibetan Buddhists nine million, but Americans are the most polytheistic people in history: they have named 330 million gods. That is the root of our insanity. We demand to be our own authorities because we demand to be the authors of our own being and meaning

Heidegger says that "the fundamental question of metaphysics" is "why is there anything at all rather than nothing?" The fundamental question is not, as Plato thought, "what" a thing is (every Platonic dialogue is about that, about an essence, a definition, a concept, such as justice or piety or learning) but why it exists, why anything exists. Plato never asked that ultimate question. And the answer is God.

Even God cannot make us love him. "Forced love" is a meaningless impossibility, like "virtuous sin".

Pascal would not have needed to read this book. He wrote: "Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life, or our death, of God or of ourselves.

Peter Kreeft

The soul is the form of the body and the body is the matter of the soul, somewhat as the meaning of a book is its form or soul and the words are its matter or body.

It is an a fortiori argument: if even the veneration of a beloved father's relics after he dies is a good thing, how much more the veneration of a saint's?

martyrdom is not only not the same as suicide, it is the polar opposite of suicide, since the suicide loves nothing in life enough to keep living, while the martyr loves something so much that he gives up everything for it, even life. The suicide sees less value and meaning in life than anyone else, while the martyr sees more.

you have nothing worth dying for, you will die. If you have nothing worth living for except mere living, you will not live.

For Our Purposes, I define reading as looking at printed words and getting enough meaning from them to satisfy your purpose.

Our lives teem with numbers, but we sometimes forget that numberss are only tools. They have no soul; they may indeed become fetishes.

The artistry of dialogue lies in experiencing the flow of meaning and seeing the one thing that needs to be said now. Like the Quakers, who enjoin members to say not simply whatever pops into their heads but only those thoughts that are compelling (and which cause the speaker to quake from the need to speak them)