Quotes About Meaning

Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people - to black people.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing.

My own belief is that rather than getting involved in trying to change the reality of social-political things, creators can be involved in and express in different ways and be meaningful in different ways, so for me, it's important to leave messages to people of the future and to be engaged with the people now.

Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.

Life is difficult. Not just for me or other ALS patients. Life is difficult for everyone. Finding ways to make life meaningful and purposeful and rewarding, doing the activities that you love and spending time with the people that you love - I think that's the meaning of this human experience.

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

No matter how much we try to run away from this thirst for the answer to life, for the meaning of life, the intensity only gets stronger and stronger. We cannot escape these spiritual hungers.

So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.

We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.

Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.

Acknowledging someone is an act of altruism in the first place, so converting that act of altruism into a pizza party or company fleece jacket or a gift card is fine, but it's not in keeping with spirit in which it all began.

There is just one reason that we are placed on this Earth. That reason is to love and be loved - in that order.

The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.

I know why I'm here. I know why I was placed in music, and it's not by coincidence.

It's funny, I often think about how, if we were all placed in an apocalyptic situation, you'd realize quickly how stupid, petty things just don't matter anymore. Who you love is who you love, and it doesn't matter.

That's my faith, that's the most important thing in my life - believing that I have a purpose here, that I was placed with an intentionality of exactly where I am supposed to be.

Ironically, the very fact that democracy has such a lengthy history has actually contributed to confusion and disagreement, for 'democracy' has meant different things to different people at different times and places.

I was reared a Catholic but I think every day we ask ourselves, not consciously, what are we doing on this planet? What's it all about?