Quotes About Meaning

Webster growled a Webster kind of prayer: "God Almighty, here is two more meek that has inherited Your earth." Webster spoke in his own peculiar way; we never did learn how to hear him.

And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

Religion is not to go to God by forsaking the world but to find Him in it.

For me, all stories are fiction. The only question is: Does it rattle the soul or not?

this is not about the mere extension of life along a horizontal plane, but about the deepening of life along a vertical plane. Mere longevity cannot render life meaningful any more than brevity has the power to make it meaningless.

In contrast we let go of existence, meaning, and the sublime as categories to describe the object "God." Instead these become ways in which we engage with the world. Yet, as we affirm the world in love, we indirectly sense that in letting go of God we have, in fact, found ourselves at the very threshold of God.

If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.

To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact

I guess basically one wants to feel that one's life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one's done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?

Our own happiness, therefore, is a by-product of aiming at something else and is not to be obtained by setting our sights on happiness alone.

There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

The fact is that none of us can unilaterally decide what a word means. Meanings of words are shared between people - they are a kind of social contract we all agree to - otherwise communication would not be possible.

A map may be beautiful, but if it doesn't tell us what we want to know, or clearly illustrate what it means to tell us, it's merely a decoration.

Nor should we forget that, in Hebrew, the very name of Jesus (Ieshouah) means salvation. Allied

For a journey without challenge, has no meaning; one without purpose, has no soul.

David W. Orr writes, in The Nature of Design, "We are losing the capacity to say what we really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.

When life has lost its meaning, a pilgrim will risk everything to get back in touch with life. This is why relics, such as a tooth of the Buddha, the dried blood of Christ, or a Shakespeare folio, are objects that must be touched as an integral part of the pilgrimage. This is what the risk is for, the confirmation that the mystery exists at all in a modern world seemingly determined to undermine the sacred as mere superstition.

The impact God has planned for us doesn't occur when we're pursuing impact. It occurs when we're pursuing God.

secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.

I appreciate life so much after I see people die. It is always just such a reminder that every moment -- this is all we have. This is it. I don't know if there is anything before or after, but this is what we do know. This is it. There are no guarantees for anything else. So we have to always, always appreciate.

Resurrection means bodily resurrection or it means nothing at all.

Even the slang of the time – 'Isn't it killing' – had an inbuilt and not entirely unconscious irony.