Quotes About Meaning

La felicidad de la existencia es esa plenitud de todos los instantes acompañada de un amor por todos los seres, y no ese amor individualista que la sociedad actual no inculca permanentemente. La verdadera felicidad procede de una bondad esencial que desea de todo corazón que cada persona encuentre sentido a su existencia. Es un amor siempre disponible, sin ostentación ni cálculo. La sencillez inmutable de un corazón bueno.

Had I renounced the Western world? Renunciation, at least as Buddhists use the term, is a much-misunderstood concept. It is not about giving up what is good and beautiful. How foolish that would be! Rather it is about disentangling oneself from the unsatisfactory and moving with determination toward what matters most. It is about freedom and meaning—freedom from mental confusion and self-centered afflictions, meaning through insight and loving-kindness.

Mais est-ce la bonne solution que de fermer les yeux sur l'effritement de notre vie pour ne les entrouvrir craintivement qu'à la veille de la mort ? N'est-il pas préférable de les ouvrir grands dès maintenant, pour nous demander : « Comment donner un sens à ma vie ? » Laissons tomber le masque des conventions, des compromis entretenus avec nos pairs, dans ce jeu que nous poursuivons depuis trop longtemps.

Celui qui a pénétré le sens de la vie ne se donne plus de peine pour ce qui ne contribue pas à la vie.

Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

at the bottom of all meaning lies a residue of nonsense.

Then he kissed her. Betsy didn't believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn't mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.

FR : Nous méritons toutes nos rencontres,  elles sont accordées à notre destin et ont une signification qu'il nous appartient de découvrir EN : We deserve all our encounters, they are granted to our destiny and have a significance it behooves us to discover

How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in front of their own eyes but in front of ours, yes, how not to look there and how not to rediscover "the negative community, the community of those who have no community"?

The authentic answer is always the question's vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

I call disaster what does not have the last limit: that which drags the last in the disaster.

Deux paroles étroitement serrées l'une contre l'autre, comme deux corps vivants, mais aux limites indécises.

The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.

Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn't speak any more, but is.

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

They do not think of death, having no other relation but with death.

Besides, I myself have now for a long time ceased to look for anything more beautiful in this world, or more interesting, than the truth; or at least than the effort one is able to make towards the truth.

As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.

I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.