Quotes About Meaning

Experience alone opens a door, but intellectual framing and reflection are required if meaning is to be made of the experience.

To be and to have meaning are the same.

It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living.

Top-down cortically mediated techniques typically use cognition to regulate affect and sensorimotor experience, focusing on meaning making and understanding. The entry point is the story, and the formulation of a coherent narrative is of prime importance. A linguistic sense of self is fostered this process, and experience changes through understanding

She begins, "What is the question we spend our entire lives asking?" and answers, "Our question is this: Are we loved? I don't mean by one another." She closes her sermon to the snakes with these words: "I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Mercy," he mumbled. "What the hell did you do to my French Roast?

My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.

I'd like to do something that means more, something that will outlast me the way these buildings have outlasted the men who built them." "I hadn't thought of it that way before," said Willon slowly. "But immortality . . . I think that's a basic instinct rather than the product of pride.

He did not enjoy the sorrow, but he would not have missed the years that he and Joseph were friends, either. Such joy was worth a little sorrow.

I know who you mean," Adam said. "And no, you're thinking about Lincoln Thorson. He's still second in the Lincoln, Nebraska, pack—which is why everyone remembers him. This isn't that Lincoln.

In the experience is the emotion. In the emotion is the gift.

We have known what it is to have had a gift, and have not ever questioned from where the gift came, only sometimes wondered. The gift has not been taken away because gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still.

I waste my life. I want to. It's the thing to do with a life. We were wrong about work--it isn't the best thing, no matter how much you love it. Wasting time is better.

But by the time you've worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices.

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die

I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.

Today's collaborative efforts often are negotiations rather than new creations born out of what has most heart and most meaning. To practice courageous collaboration is to commit ourselves to something that is worthy of our whole selves. And, we invite others to show up in the same way. From that new place different possibilities emerge.

Some words may make you happy, some may make you sad. Maybe some will make you angry. What I hope. . . what I hope is that something will whisper in your ear.

Sometimes poetry--words--give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

Joy connects us to something larger than ourselves," Beethoven explained, "while happiness is something more personal, something a little more selfish perhaps.

Above all, he was posing the question that has vexed philosophers for centuries: Knowing that we are going to die, how are we to live?

But you have poetry, you say. And if you can tell me what poetry is, where the line is drawn between the beauty and the breathing of breath into something to make it beautiful, I will claim poetry as my own."-Patricia Smith