Quotes About Meaning

Es que hacemos las cosas sólo para recordarlas? ¿Es que vivimos sólo para tener memoria de nuestra vida? Porque sucede que hasta la esperanza es memoria y que el deseo es el recuerdo de lo que ha de venir.

A house has a physical definition; a home has a spiritual one.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

For this is the journey that men make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find.

We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.

It was his opinion that a man had to wait until he was dead to know the meaning of God, unless he happened to have known the sea in his youth.

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?

Whenever you interpret anything, you can read it two ways: in such a way that your interpretation creates mercy, and in such a way that it creates sacrifice.

Forget purpose. It's okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had — the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know.

It is the religious sense – a "radical engagement of the self with life" – that alone enables us to fulfil the promise of the scripture that we might have life and might have it more abundantly. How sad it is that our quest for self-mastery and a widespread sense of emptiness and loss-of-meaning go hand-in-hand, yet we often fail to see the connection.

As I see it, only two types of men capture entirely the grandeur of the human being: the anarchist and the authentically religious man. By nature, man is relation to the infinite: on the one hand, the anarchist affirms himself to an infinite degree, while, on the other, the authentically religious man accepts the infinite as his meaning.

18 «Nell'esperienza di un grande amore tutto ciò che accade diventa un avvenimento nel suo ambito» (R. Guardini, L'essenza del Cristianesimo, Morcelliana, Brescia 1980, p. 12). 19 «La vita dell'uomo consiste nell'affetto che principalmente lo sostiene e nel quale trova la sua più grande soddisfazione» (cfr. san Tommaso, Summa Theologiae, II IIae, q. 179, a. 1).

Luigi Giussani

insomma, come tutto

Tant'è vero che il tentativo supremo di chi non vuol più accettare è quello di suicidarsi.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

wonder, if we in the U.S. stopped buying cocaine and stopped selling heavy weapons across the border, what would happen then? So easy to talk about them. What does it mean when they are also us?

Art is memory's mise-en-scene.

I believe in an "emotional architecture." It is very important for human kind that architecture should move by its beauty; if there are many equally valid technical solutions to a problem, the one which offers the user a message of beauty and emotion, that one is architecture.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.

In the end, belief and the lack of it amount to the same thing. If someone were to prove to me—right this minute—that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

The worthiest among human beings, said Diogenes according to Stobaeus (3.86.19), are those who despise learning and prefer a state of ignorance-ignorance understood not in the sense of not knowing anything, but in the sense of dispensing with unnecessary learning and acquiring only the knowledge that is sufficient for a good and simple life. This is what Diogenes identified as the only meaning and purpose of philosophy.