Quotes About Meaning

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—

Cruzaban por su mente los mismos pensamientos, inútiles para un hombre como él, sin gran talento, aunque no para Sófocles: lo accidental que es el sino, o lo accidental que todo puede parecer cuando es ineludible.

Chekhov: 'The important thing is to find the right smile.

He pronounces "death" like "debt.

Words aren't only bombs and bullets—no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Todo es un error -le dije-. ¿No es eso lo que me has estado diciendo? No existe más que error. Ahí está el meollo del mundo. Nadie encuentra su vida. Eso es la vida.

I am more of a menace than I realize. This is serious. Premature senility. Senilitia, dementia, hell-bent-for-disaster erotomania.

All the great thoughts he had not reached were beyond enumeration; there was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life.

Meu pai era dono de botequim, porém insistia que era preciso escolher as palavras com precisão, e nisso sou como ele. As palavras têm significados — meu pai só estudou até a sétima série, mas até ele sabia disso. Atrás do balcão ele guardava duas coisas pra resolver discussões entre seus clientes: um porrete e um dicionário.

In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accomodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense of life?

Había aprendido lo peor de las lecciones que puede dar la vida: la de que carece de sentido. Y cuando sucede tal cosa, la felicidad nunca vuelve a ser espontánea, sino que es artificial e, incluso entonces, se compra el precio de un obstinado distanciamiento de uno mismo y de su historia.

And yet nothing of what he surmised meant a goddamn thing. None of his great ideas disposed of a single one of her difficulties.

To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?

Sometimes the only meaning we can offer a suffering person is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has a meaning for us.

The main purpose of prayer is not to make life easier, nor to gain magical powers, but to know God.

I'm convinced that human beings instinctively seek two things. We long for meaning, a sense that our life somehow matters to the world around us. And we long for community, a sense of being loved.

Virtually every passage on suffering in the New Testament deflects the emphasis from cause to response. Although we cannot grasp the master plan of the universe, which allows for so much evil and pain (the Why? question), we can nevertheless respond in two important ways. First, we can find meaning in the midst of suffering. Second, we can offer real and practical help to those in need.

La fe consiste en creer por anticipado algo que solo tendrá sentido cuando se mire hacia el pasado.

As Dennis Covington has written, Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. 7-20

At the end of her story she said simply, "As I look back, this is what matters. I have loved and been loved, and all the rest is just background music.

Death becomes the expression of everything you are, and you can bring to it only what you have brought to your life," said Roemer after the filming.