Quotes About Meaning

Find your significance within yourself. Within your own sphere of power—that is where you have the greatest consequence.

The man has to learn 'what each specific thing means', as Socrates often said, and stop casually applying preconceptions to individual cases.

Back in civilization I begin the questioning," wrote Randy. "What to do with life? What kind of life? In wilderness this ceases; the questions aren't answered, they dissolve."   BEFORE

Genocide is a word. Like the words "love" or "God," it seems to be comprehensible. But in fact it cannot be grasped, it cannot be taken in. It is the unspeakable made verbal.

Incerc sa le explic parintilor mei ca viata e un dar buclucas. La inceput ai tendinta sa-l supraestimezi crezand ca viata pe care ai primit-o este vesnica. Apoi, dimpotriva, il subestimezi, gasind ca-i o porcarie, scurta de nu-ntelegi nimic din ea si pe care uneori ti-ar veni s-o arunci de sa nu se vada. Abia catre sfarsit pricepi ca nu-i vorba de niciun dar, ci de un simplu imprumut. Pe care trebuie sa incerci sa-l meriti.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

Passionate hatreds can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. These people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences — nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.

To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.

Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting and scholastic tortuousness.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless.

Narrative is the frame upon which we hang selected swaths of experience in order to construct a shelter of meaning.

With success came a new, deeper doubt that any activity, even his cherished writing, could make life mean anything.

To put it aphoristically, no experience can feel meaningful to a nihilist—that is, to someone who has already decided that life is meaningless.

Benjamin, we're meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?

She taught me to play the piano, and what it meant to miss somebody.

We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...

There's no shame in loving life above death. Otherwise I would be dead. What use would that be to the gods, who will not die themselves?

You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were passionate about don't mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy.