Quotes About Meaning

The creation of an authentic work of art, the creation of an authentic life - they are one and the same.

working at Amazon was not just a job - it was part of a visionary quest, something to give higher meaning to their lives.

There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you.

In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.

Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words. Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

Without a sense of purpose to life, a sense of what is truly most important to us, we become like the ball in a pinball machine, bouncing away from fear after fear. When we have a clear purpose, we may feel afraid or encounter obstacles, but we will do what it takes to move through the fear and solve the problems in front of us.

I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed [...] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don't matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.

The book is warm. The book is handy. The book is handsome to the eye. The book occupies the shelf of the owner and is a reflection of him or her or, actually, me. The book is always there, to be reached for, to be thumbed and, too often I admit, to wonder about: Why did I buy this?

The symbolism of the action has been replaced by the reality of the touch.

As is often true of biblical literature, it is up to the reader to hear and appraise the contradictory messages and then create from them a pattern of meaning that relates to the reader's particular situation.

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

Poems and epitaphs are but stuff, Here lies Bob Barras and that's enough.

The only action we have to take is to decide whether we are going to stay closed or open up, accept experience as it is or rationalize it to death. This is what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that what we seek is not the meaning of life but the "experience of being alive.

Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.

Richard Elliott Friedman

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.

Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.

Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.