Quotes About Meaning

What does the soul truly want is a story

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.

The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.

T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It.

You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.

There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.

You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.

you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?

I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.

Der Engländer, der sich im Urwald von Nigeria zum Dinner umkleidet, fühlt, daß diese Handlung einen Sinn hat.

Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.

As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent.

Minden szenvedés titkos oka - írta - maga a halandóság, amely egyúttal az élet elsÅ'dleges feltételét is alkotja. Ha igent akarunk mondani az èletre, akkor nem tagadhatjuk meg annak végességét sem.

Myth is much more important and true than history.

The symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche.

I suppose that everyone of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.

Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.

My mind opened eagerly to meet them, but my soul was already ruined for ever, soiled and dead. It had been bitten by a mean, weak-nerved timidity, like a tick in a dog's ear: you tear it off, but the small head remains to grow again into a complete, loathsome insect.

See, the way I got it figured, dying is sort'a like the thing that gives your life meaning. You may not want to get there, but, without it, you're just looking at a long, long road to nowhere.

Silence gives meaning to the language of the eyes; and silence of the lips cannot keep the secret that a glance betrays.