Quotes About Meaning

Poverty is not only a lack of money, it's a lack of sense of meaning.

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The species greatest harvest ? words.

Blue and Gray veterans led the way in focusing public attention on the minute details of each battle, a move that tended to distract attention from larger questions of meaning. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and thus pride in knowing where and when General Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not in knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia.

living life in a pragmatic, utilitarian manner turns you into a utilitarian pragmatist. The "How do I succeed?" questions quickly eclipse the "Why am I doing this?" questions.

William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

Song references are like emotional shortcuts and social acronyms.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.

When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

Now, why is it that the idea of intention keeps turning up in explanations of adaptation, intruding even into ones where it is supposed to have no place? And why is it as hard, as we saw in the preceding section that it is, to translate the idea of intention out of the explanation of any particular adaptation? "Surely

Namely, that for every once that Dawkins says that genes are not purposive, he says a hundred things (many of which I have quoted) which imply that genes are purposive. And

It has turned out, in fact, to be far harder to translate teleological into non-teleological language than had been anticipated by philosophers; or at any rate, by philosophers friendly towards Darwinism (as virtually all the writers in question are). Whether such translation is possible at all is more than anyone knows. As

Quentin is very organic there was no way that he was going to put someone else's hand in there and anyway, my hands are kind of famous. It seemed right.

Death gives us a whole new perspective on life" Excerpt from my recent journal titled "My Thoughts On Death

Never mistake legibility for communication.

I have a liberal arts English degree, so I was brought up thinking that's what it was all about, and I had to learn that sometimes, or often times, art just is. It's not attempting at anything. It's not providing answers. I had to grow up a little bit before I got to that.

Because in all my own searching, I know now what the true meaning and purpose of life is. It is to be happy. To feel joy. That is why evil will always conquer itself in time.

But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story...

But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.

People sometimes say: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' That's true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.

Intonation is the use of pitch to convey meaning in a language. It has been described as the music or melody of speech.