Quotes About Meaning

Life without God is a long and fruitless search for enjoyment, meaning, and fulfillment.

Nous sommes imprégnés de cynisme, d'explications psychologiques ou autres, mais la vie est toujours là, ainsi que son essence inacessible, son cycle aussi sûrement installé qu'autrefois.

Søren Kierkegaard

Maybe a single life doesn't amount to much but perhaps it should at least drift toward the common good.

No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of blasphemy and fate.

The feathers on your chin mean that you ate the parakeet.

The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.

All our lives we sweat and save Building for a shallow grave Must be something else we say Somehow to defend this place Everything must be this way.

I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.

Maybe the hokie pokie is what it's all about?

Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I'd have an excuse.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.

I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.

We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...

There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.

Tell me what matters, BZ said. Nothing, Maria said.

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.

She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much.

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.