Quotes About Meaning

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

Writing seems like the only job where what you think and feel really matters.

What is the worth of anything, But for the happiness 'twill bring?

If you remember the why, the how will work itself out.

Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, people give up hope that they can expect anything more from life, when the real quest is finding out what life expects from them.

In your hurry to keep Christmas, you have forgotten Christmas. The truest gift of Christmas is the gift of self.

As long as you remember the whys, the hows will take care of themselves.

I sighed. "Now what do I do?" He leaned against my wall. "What do you want to do?" "Since when has that mattered?" "It's always mattered. It doesn't mean you'll get what you want, but what you want always matters. That's what defines you.

Sometimes, it's only in walking the path that we discover why we are walking at all.

if you take away everything a man lives for, then what does he live for?

On the calendar, all days look the same, but they do not carry the same weight.

All things are possible with God." "And if there is no God?" Enele turned back. "Then we're just dust and beasts, and what does it matter?

I once heard a preacher say, "The reason we sometimes connect so quickly with a complete stranger is because the friendship is not of this life, but is the resumption of a friendship from another." I do not know if this is true, but sometimes it feels true.

I don't get that, I mean, what's power? Let's say he suddenly becomes king of the world. What is he going to do with it that he can't do now? Is his food going to taste better? Is the weather going to be nicer? Will love feel better? I just don't understand that mentality.

It's like being dead without the commitment.

For poetry, like life, is its own justification

Nearly a million people take their lives each year. It's not about survival; it's about finding meaning in living. Even in our suffering

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.

Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which was become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.