Quotes About Meaning

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech

Ah, how much more soothing (that is to say, if one should get the choice) to be wiped off the earth by hell-bound fiends than by neurotics.

The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one.

A word's fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage.

A je?li kto? ci? zapyta kim jeste??, to odpowiedz Ja jestem Nikt - jak rzek? niegdy? Polifemowi Odys.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

Your life is a sheer gift.

No poem is ever written for its story line's sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary. - Joseph Brodsky

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. Love is a friendship set to music.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

I don't think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we're seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive

You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

Deep down inside, we don't seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive.

I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.

anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life.