Quotes About Meaning

All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

It is impossible to make individuals feel sacred inside of a profane, empty, or accidental universe.

Have you ever noticed that the expression "the light of the world" is used to describe the Christ (John 8:12), but that Jesus also applies the same phrase to us? (Matthew 5:14, "You are the light of the world.")

Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

As Mary Oliver puts it, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Good art seems absolutely essential to healthy religion.

For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the "enchanting" ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment.

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

Myth is, in fact, something that is so true that it can be adequately expressed only in story, symbol, and ritual. It can't be abstracted and objectified. Its meaning and mystery are so deep and broad that they can be presented only in story form. When you step into a story, you find it is without limits and you can walk around with it and inside it. It is natural to sing, dance, and reenact a story. It is too big and too deep to be merely "understood" or taught.

If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.

What made us think we were

In the practical order, we find our Original Goodness when we can discover and own these three attitudes or virtues deeply planted within us: A trust in inner coherence itself. "It all means something!" (Faith) A trust that this coherence is positive and going somewhere good. (Hope) A trust that this coherence includes me and even defines me. (Love)

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong "container" or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean we do it well. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose, or passion.

But it takes us much longer to discover "the task within the task," as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

Your heart needs to be broken—and broken open—at least once to discover what your heart means and to have a heart for others.

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.

La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.

For years now he'd believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.

probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it.

The more he thought about it, life's truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

How, he couldn't help wondering, did you get to be this woman's age and still believe, as she apparently did, that everything meant something? She was obviously one of those people who just soldiered on, determined to believe whatever gave them comfort in the face of all contrary evidence. And maybe that wasn't so dumb. The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.