Quotes About Meaning

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.

Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

Life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing to be shuffled through as best as we can but a lofty and exalted destiny.

Life without pain has no meaning.

Life is not inherently meaningful. We make meaning happen through the attention and care we express through our actions.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

You're serving. You're not a servant. Serving is a supreme art. God is the first servant. God serves men but he's not a servant to men. - Eliseo Orefice

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one's life to a larger goal.

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

Life isn't nearly as sacred as the appreciation of passion.

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

Life is an opportunity afforded to each not to eat and drink, but to achieve something nobler and higher to merge in the Reality.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another.

Nowhere in Scripture do we find doctrine studied for its own sake or in isolation from life.

One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.