Quotes About Meaning

We need precise words for Jesus. Otherwise, Christian theology is built on a foundation of sand.

He read the first one all the way through and breathed in the love, that hot, hurting feeling under your ribs...Love that made life matter even when you were just looking back at it.

He once asked me, "You know how when you find somebody who you know is in touch with the truth, how you want to be in the presence of that person?

Frankly, I think that after we die, we have this wide understanding of what's real. And we'll probably say, 'Ah, so that's what it was all about.' Fred Rogers

Okay," Crick said, rolling his eyes. "I give. Which part of my body is more interesting than my ass?" Deacon rewarded his obtuseness with a smack to the head. "Your heart, you fuckin' moron. Man, I get about fifteen minutes a day max out of your ass—it's your heart I want twenty-four-seven. Jesus, Crick—stop thinking in your pants!

Breathing was easier, and he felt the stiffness on his ribs, which meant they'd been taped.

Hammer", I finished lamely, as he waited patiently for my thoughts to find their voice, "we have got to find better words for the things we have in our hearts." "Words seem to be weak things," he murmured into my hair, and I could only hope our hearts would prove stronger.

A pattern called a war.Christ! What are patterns for?

Christ! What are patterns for?

Many people can and have written books, but many have nothing to say.

She loved the way you could transform the meaning of a scene with how you played it.

Has to pay for his company. If you take my meaning.

It is no grcat thing to livc long, nor cvcn to livc for cvcr; but it is a grcat thing to live well.

Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential.

Religion has been defined as designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, 'I really like that' or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.

Jesus is about to give up his life, which requires determining what a life is worth. And that means we all have to determine what our own lives are worth. What is worth dying for? What is worth living for? What are our values, and have we lived up to them?

Our role as historians is to ask, "What would these stories have conveyed to the people who first heard them?" Our role as readers is also to ask, "What do these stories mean to me, and what have they meant to my community and to my tradition over time and across the globe?

There is little reason to argue over who has the correct reading here. Isaiah's words will mean, and should mean, different things to different people over time. Moreover, different translations necessarily give rise to different interpretations, and translation itself is an act of interpretation.

The Triumphal Entry cannot be separated from the cross, and the cross cannot be separated from the call of justice. And that call cannot be separated from risk, personal, professional, permanent.

When the Evangelists mention a date and a place, they are telling us to pay attention, for time and space hold a surfeit of meaning.

The star of Bethlehem is not about science; it is about the search for meaning.

To grasp the implications of the comparison—the term "parable" comes from the Greek para, "along side, together with," as in "parallel" or "paradox," and balo, "to cast," "to throw"—we need to understand the nuances of each side of the equation. We immediately realize that, with such comparisons, no single meaning can ever be determined, just as no single metaphor or simile can be restricted.

The name Zechariah comes from the Hebrew root z-k-r, which means "remember"; the "yah" at the end is the marker for YHWH, so the name means "God remembers.

Once we figure out the sign, whether of a pregnant woman, of a mother who has just given birth, of a newborn, even of baby clothes or a stable, our next step is to work out the symbolism, or what that sign "signifies.