Quotes About Meaning

Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.'

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for "there.

good art illustrates anything at all, it's likely to be a story you didn't even know needed telling.

Language is power. Words shape the way we interact with the world.

Seventeen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street—distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness and from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death.

If we are incapable of controlling our existence, life loses its meaning, too.

As much as a child's birthday is important to a parent, as much as twenty one meant to me, a year in recovery means more.

I never planned to pray. I just looked back and realized I had been praying. …. What did I pray for?

La trama è roba per gente morta.

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it"—

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means.

When Nietzsche said, "God is dead", he himself immediately replaced God with a new God, the Superman. Who would bother with Nietzsche's philosophy if he pronounced God dead and then hanged himself? Nietzsche immediately resurrected God, hence God was never dead. God is always ready to be re-expressed. It's not the concept of God that's wrong, it's the concept of the wrong God, wrongly defined and understood.

Seniors in turn don't benefit from our ability to help them with their end-of-life tasks. They become developmental orphans, and their search for legacy, which must be helped along by caring younger adults, doesn't take place.

When we start to realize that we're not going to be here forever, we become aware that it's not clear what it meant to be here at all.

propel them backward, not forward, to reflect on what their lives have meant—to themselves, their loved ones, and the world at large.

It seems symbolic that I can't write my name anymore," she told Mr. Nosy.

So you're saying that having kids is what it's all about and once you've had them you start waiting to die?

Be life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

each subjective pleasure which had no foundation in action, there was a subjective sorrow,

Today is your day and mine, the only day we have, the day in which we play our part. What our part may signify in the great whole we may not understand, but we are here to play it, and now is the time. This we know, it is a part of action, not of whining. It is a part of love, not cynicism. It is for us to express love in terms of human helpfulness. This we know, for we have learned from sad experience that any other course of life leads toward decay and waste.

Meaning springs from belonging.

After all, how could I be a person if Ultimate Reality were impersonal?