Quotes About Meaning

Life has more meaning in the face of Death.

For Pericles it would be nous, the ancient Greek word for "mind" or "intelligence." Nous is a force that permeates the universe, creating meaning and order. The human mind is naturally attracted to this order; this is the source of our intelligence. For

The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is that all about? What is it for?

I prefer the word aviatrix. It has more zing to it. It's very zingy, I agreed.

Sanity? Sorry, but I don't remember having such a useless thing in the first place.

Shanna, sweet Shanna. How can I tell you what you mean to me? When I saw you at the ball it was as if my heart started beating again. You lit up the room, bright in an ocean of black and white. And I thought- my life has been nothing but a dark, endless night. Then you came out like a rainbow and filled my black soul with color.

Ye are different, Emma. I doona need ye in order to survive. But surviving is no' the same as living. Or the same as feeling human again. I am alive when I'm with you. Ye feed my soul. (Angus MacKay)

An evil vampire would not have such a black pit of pain and remorse hidden in his heart. He wouldn't know the meaning of remorse.

Harry Yutu. His last name is Eskimo for 'The Claw.

What is this intermediate step? Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. We add meaning to the action we observed. We make a guess at the motive driving the behavior. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad? And then, based on these thoughts or stories, our body responds with an emotion.

The Pool of Shared Meaning is the birthplace of synergy.

whatever the decision-making method, the greater the shared meaning in the pool, the better the choice, the more the unity, and the stronger the conviction

Here's why gifted communicators keep a close eye on safety. Dialogue calls for the free flow of meaning—period. And nothing kills the flow of meaning like fear. When you fear that people aren't buying into your ideas, you start pushing too hard. When you fear that you may be harmed in some way, you start withdrawing and hiding.

As people begin to feel unsafe, they start down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).

Not long ago he had turned sixty, an age when people hunger for a moment, however small, that will justify the years they have spent and those that still remain to them.

If developing ties to this world and exercising love and compassion are not the very point of us -- I cannot presume to know -- then we are at least better occupied in this way, I feel, than with the riddles of other worlds, which only prove impossible for us to solve and unhealthy even to ponder.

Anyone can do this if they really understand the true meaning behind life. There's a start and there's an end. We all start in the same place. Then we get older and it ends. All of the stuff that happens in the middle, for those of us lucky enough to have one—it's all helping us to basically be a fucking great example to those who are coming after us. It's all education. It's all knowledge. It's all wisdom.

Even if we never talk again after tonight, please know that I'm forever changed because of who you are, and what you've meant to me.

Religion fared badly in so much of the history he wrote about, and yet he was constantly surprised by how much solace he gained from places of worship. It wasn't redemptive, nothing to do with conscience—more the strange sense of meaningful emptiness he found in these places, a quality that allowed him to disappear effortlessly. The

he had the wrong constitution for disappearing. Because that was what disappearing would mean, the life of a permanent tourist, soulless, drowning in small talk.

It didn't matter, though, how weakly sentimental the catalyst had been, only that he'd been receptive to it.

Was this how trauma worked? she wondered. Those closest to it remained dumbfounded by the fact that those who weren't present could derive meaning from it?

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.