Quotes About Meaning

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

When hospitality becomes an art, it loses its very soul.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

I see there is a good deal of grandiloquence in my book — my friends and foes have told me. I think it must be true, for there is a good deal of grandiloquence in me — and in nature also: I saw a sunset last evening that was a gross imposition upon modesty.

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

Music is the soul of language.

In den Glasperlen des Märchens spiegelt sich die Welt.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn't they matter most now?

We all die," Abrim said. "How we die is more important than when." "And how we live before we die," Salom added. "That is why I serve--to give meaning to my life.

It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, "You can't do anything with philosophy." The only mistake is to believe that with this, the judgment concerning philosophy is at an end. For a little epilogue arises in the form of a counter-question: even if we can't do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it?

The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.

Where 'doing one's job' cannot be directly linked to the highest spiritual and cultural values--although it may be felt to be more than mere economic coercion--the individual today usually makes no attempt to find any meaning in it. Where capitalism is at its most unbridled, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, divested of its metaphysical significance, today tends to be associated with purely elemental passions, which at times virtually turn it into a sporting contest.

Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: 'Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: "What shall we do and how shall we live?"' That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives 'no' answer, and whether or not science might yet be of use to the one who puts the question correctly.

All theology represents an intellectual rationalization of the possession of sacred values... Every theology... presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable.

It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning.

As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose the magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything.

Words are soldiers of fortune Hired by different ideas.

The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.

Such a Creator would not deliberately engineer his product to fail, any more than a manufacturer would deliberately build failure into an automobile. The fundamentalists tell us that man's chief purpose and reason for living is to "glorify God," and the humanists tell us that man's primary purpose is to "express himself fully.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best -- out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.