Quotes About Meaning

Buddhist mantras are deliberately deep yet superficially meaningless - to take your mind off things

Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.

What was being weighed on the scales of the night

No word is absolutely wrong or dirty or insulting. It all depends upon context and intention.

We cannot escape most of the crises in our lives, nor should we. In fact, these events frequently provide the energy for movement on our spiritual journey, even when we are stuck along the way... we ask questions about our own life. We wonder about meaning. Our present view may become inadequate. We ask deeper questions. Even joyful experiences can propel us forward.

we have chosen to speak of spirituality ultimately as the way in which we live out our response to God. Unless we find this personal, transformational meaning in its fullest sense, the struggle for wholeness will remain unresolved. As Augustine put it in the first paragraph of his Confessions, 'God created us for a relationship with him and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God.

SMITH TREASURE," she read softly. "It was the kids, right? That's what they were trying to say. In the house. Everywhere. The SMITH TREASURE was the kids.

Death isn't a tragedy," he continued. "Death is merely a step to something better. The tragedy is a life misspent. Yours wasn't." Misspent? It hardly seemed spent at all. "But I didn't get a chance to do anything important." "You learned to love and to forgive. That is a life well spent." The

Cap notices the first red and gold leaves of the fall eddying on the surface of the lake. Do they make a pattern? Perhaps. She could impose form: a ragged spiral; a cluster disrupted by ducks; a single reed caught between reeds. She could impose symbolic meaning. She believes this may be life's primary requirement: to impose a tolerable meaning on randomness.

If you look at it from another point of view, words can be very confusing. Because they are often beautiful and we have so many of them and although they are very powerful they have no will of their own, we can use them without permission-wildly, madly and get into terrible muddles.

That two women could mean a great deal to each other while they awaited men to lead them to marriage and the real business of life is negligible; that they could believe that the real business of life is in meaning a great deal to each other and that men are only incidental to their lives—is of course frightening.82

Art is a spiritual practice. If it weren't for art, I'd have given up on God a long time ago. This cathedral though....is very convincing.

Felicidad? ¿Qué felicidad? ¿Donde esta? ¿Que es la felicidad? Como si amar a alguien siempre fuera felicidad.

A friend of mine once told me 'For people like us, the meaning is the search for the meaning.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely. All you really have that really matters are feelings. That's what music is to me." – Janis Joplin

Perhaps no word exists in our terribly inadequate English language to name this abstract, emotional thing that is not forgiveness, is not forgetting, and also is both.

Life is a mighty joke that is not meant to be funny."

I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.

Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world.

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

But to cast my life away just like that for nothing at all -- that I won't do.

We find the heaven within us when we recover our own preciousness; we find the heaven between us when another tenderly helps us heal; we find the heaven around us when, moving from hell to well, we find in the ordinary world the beauty and meaning that was earlier bleached out of it. And some, too, find a heaven of angels, which may pierce through the veils of our lives in moments of need or when our spiritual search takes us there.

Without a belief in a fair and moral universe, a sense of control of one's fate, a coherent sense of self, and a continuous personal narrative, life makes no sense. Living becomes a pointless exercise of getting through the day. People reeling from trauma are thrown into a crisis of meaning that goes far beyond disillusionment; they are plunged into an abyss of despair."18

God will stop at nothing to get through to us, overwhelming us with symbols, piling them up one on another without carefully codifying whether and how they all make sense. One thing they are not is tragically empty, distant, cold. They are humming, hot-blooded, and full of life.