Quotes About Meaning

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

You call yourselves 'realists', but you remain strangers to reality and blind to its totality, dreamless sleepers wandering aimlessly in search of life's true meaning and purpose which lie buried among the ruins of your own greatest longings.

Faced with the mind-surpassing grandeur of the universe, we cannot but admit that there is meaning which is greater than man.

This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.

Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.

Het begin van geluk is gelegen in het begrip dat het leven zonder verwondering niet de moeite waard is geleefd te worden. (p.56)

We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.

For the pious person, destiny means not simply to accomplish, but to contribute.

Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. Modern

Above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live as if it were a work of art. You're not a machine. When you're young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

Above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live it as if it were a work of art. You're not a machine. When you're young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

It is not utility that we seek in religion but eternity.

It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is

The prophets make us partners of an existence meant for us. What was revealed to them was not for their sake but intended to inspire us. The word must not freeze into habit; it must remain an event. To disregard the importance of continuous understanding is an evasion of the living challenge of the prophets, an escape from the urgency of responsible experience of every man, a denial of the deeper meaning of "the oral Torah.

To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.

Religion is an answer to man's ultimate questions. The moment we become oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.

is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.

The Bible is the perpetual motion of the spirit, an ocean of meaning, its waves beating against man's abrupt and steep shortcomings, its echo reaching into the blind alleys of his wrestling with despair.

to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

The way to understand the meaning of torah min hashamayim ("the Bible is from heaven") is to understand the meaning of hashamayim min hatorah ("heaven is from the Bible). Whatever taste of "heaven" we have on earth is in the Bible.

Freedom does not mean the right to live as we please. It means the power to live spiritually, to rise to a higher level of existence.