Quotes About Meaning

Albert Einstein was asked one day by a friend "Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?" "Yes, it would be possible," he replied, "but it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning—as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation in wave pressure." RONALD W. CLARK, Einstein: The Life and Times

A college president I know keeps three books on his night table: the Bible, the Iliad, and Louis Auchincloss' 1964 novel The Rector of Justin. When I once asked him, "Why the novel?," he responded, "Because it raises questions I cannot answer or ignore, the sort of questions that possess a wisdom apart from answers.

Life is simply the pursuit of something worth dying for.

The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.

How did it sound?" asked Tom. "Awful! But it didn't matter how it sounded!" said Robin. "It was how it felt!

the lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story

The marriage of work has everything to do with the romance of the everyday.

Work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.

The room is still quite cold when the list of achievements is read but the atmosphere quickens when you hear what they loved, what they held in their affections…you realize what you learn you have lost [in someone dying] is you've lose what they loved and everything else is like chafe blown away.

The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.

If silence equals death, then art equals language equals life." —David Wojnarowicz

A cockroach has no soul. Yet it runs and eats and shits and fucks and breeds. It has no soul, yet it lives a full life. Just like you.

Here's what's going to happen: You're going to die and you're going to stand at the gates of judgement and you're going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, 'I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to YOU to give it meaning'.

I don't see it right now - maybe it was in a different book - but anyway, he says that when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages." "What, like his Bible was possessed? Holy shit, he must have been the worst priest ever.

You'll know that humans aren't cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, with a rusty knife. Because otherwise, here's what's going to happen: you're going to die and you're going to stand at the gates of judgment and you're going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, 'I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning.

you're going to die and you're going to stand at the gates of judgment and you're going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, 'I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning.

humans aren't cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, with a rusty knife. Because otherwise, here's what's going to happen: you're going to die and you're going to stand at the gates of judgment and you're going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, 'I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning.

here's what's going to happen: you're going to die and you're going to stand at the gates of judgment and you're going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, 'I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning.

I'm not crazy," I said, crazily, to my court-appointed therapist.

Words described real experiences, and their curves and lines left a mental trail for me to follow by sense memory, whereas numbers threw curves at me and stonewalled me with their lines, barring me from understanding them, where they came from, and where they went. Math did not describe anything to me; if people themselves were often disconnected parts—sometimes one, sometimes many—how could I hope to quantify the rest of the world? Discrete amounts had little meaning for me.

Thus every day, from morning to night, I wait in despair for something. I wish I could be glad that I was born, that I am alive, that there are people and a world.

It is commonplace to talk as if the world "has" meaning, to ask what "is" the meaning of a phrase, a gesture, a painting, a contract. Yet when thought about, it is clear that events are devoid of meaning until someone assigns it to them.

Entertainment alleviates the fear of life, but art vanquishes the fear of death

The "result" of life is death, so when you create, the importance is not on the result but on the process of creating in and of itself.