Quotes About Meaning

I went back to the car. Pike said, "Just family, right?" "Or clever impersonators.

The man stared at him for a time, and then said something that John Chen would recall from time to time for the rest of his life, and wonder what the man had meant, and why he had said it. "Never turn your back on love, John." The

He is defiling justice." Defiling. That was probably the merlot talking.

Geography, from a Greek word that means essentially a description of the earth

It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.

People need symbols, something greater than their own lives.

A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, grace metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, Why don't you say what you mean? We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

He thought that I was after him for a feather--- The white one in his tail: like one who takes everything said as personal to himself.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Too long I've owed you this apology For the apparently unmeaning sorrow You were afflicted with in those old days. But it was of the essence of the trial You shouldn't understand it at the time.

What is this? This life? Our sitting here by lanternlight together Amid the wreckage of a former home? You won't deny the lantern isn't new. The stove is not, and you are not to me, Nor I to you.

My definition of literature would be just this: words that have become deeds.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. –

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.

The star itself-Heaven's greatest star, Not a meteorite, but an avatar— Who had made an overnight descent To show by deeds he didn't resent My having depended on him so long, And yet done nothing about it in song. A symbol was all he could hope to convey, An intimation, a shot of ray, A meaning I was supposed to seek, And finding, wasn't disposed to speak.

In three words I can sum up everything I've

I often say that I don't worry about the meaning of life--I can't handle that big stuff. What concerns me is the meaning in life--day by day, hour by hour, while I'm doing whatever it is that I do. What counts is not what I do, but how I think about myself while I'm doing it.

Making a living and having a life are not the same thing. Making a living and making a life that's worthwhile are not the same thing. Living the good life and living a good life are not the same thing. A job title doesn't even come close to answering the question. What do you do?.

I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have - I can reflect light into the dark places of this world - into the black places in the hearts of men - and change somethings in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.

As these anecdotes illustrate, ritual refers to two kinds of acts: those things we do for the first time that, in fact, have been done by the human race again and again forever—and those patterns that we ourselves repeat again and again because they bring structure and meaning to our individual and collective lives.

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

When I'm finished, I have a sense of accomplishment. A sense of competence. I am good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it's a religious experience, you know. Water, earth, fire—polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles—round and round—beginning and end—Alpha and Omega, amen. I am in touch with the GREAT SOMETHING-OR-OTHER. For a moment, at least, life is tidy and has meaning.

Religion is the great balm of existence because it takes us outside ourselves, connects us to something larger