Quotes About Meaning

T]he sheer magnitude of Britain's commitment and loss at Gallipoli made it seem vital years later that she should play a major role in the postwar Middle East to give some sort of meaning to so great a sacrifice.

Giving and receiving love is at the heart of being human. It is our raison d'être.

We seek bridges from our isolation through people, possessions and accomplishment. But none of these are ever quite capable of satisfying the restlessness of the human heart. To be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine.

Thomas Merton puts it this way: "Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."2

What God wants is simply our presence, even if it feels like a waste of potentially productive time. That is what friends do together—they waste time with each other. Simply being together is enough without expecting to "get something" from the interaction. It should be no different with God.

Calling brings freedom and fulfillment because it orients us toward something bigger than self.

Prospective users hear the blockchain hype and assume the hypothetical plans are real products that exist now — though "the blockchain could" is a phrase that really means "the blockchain doesn't," because if it did, they'd say that.

The secret of the universe is this: The universe doesn't care. That part of the job is yours.

Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.

Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it's just randomness.

Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake.

There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

Dionysius warns us that we cannot begin to understand how symbols work until we rid ourselves of the notion that divine things are likely to be beautiful.

How can you have dignity in labor if you personally believe your job shouldn't really exist?

Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.

The reader might be asking: But what does all this have to do with the origins of money? The answer is, surprisingly: everything.

That's what anarchism is for me: a community of purpose without a community of definition.

It seems that whenever there's a word for something everyone agrees to be desirable—"truth," "beauty," "love," "democracy"—then there will be no consensus as to what it really means.

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon. —Plato, The Symposium

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself.

In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.