Quotes About Meaning

To have meaning, our lives require both passion and purpose. A life without passion is like a furnace without fuel, and without purpose, like a ship without a rudder.

We want to encourage people. You are not just another kid in the youth group or the lady on the third row. God has a purpose for every life.

The big art is our life.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.

What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Education is not solely about earning a great living. It means living a great life.

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.

It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I did not waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

The simple fact that there's a title for him-husband-means he has a role in the family, whatever his ethnicity.

We have life, but this does not mean we are better people. In fact, we must struggle even more than mortals do to remain good. How easy it is for goodness to have no meaning when punishment, retribution- or hell- have no meaning. It makes as much sense for Eleanor to choose thrill-seeking or Samuel to choose murder as it does for you and me to choose love and family.

Do you think you and Sorel will be together forever?" "Of course. Either in each other's company, as we are now, or separate and in each other's world. One takes on others as family and continually reshapes that meaning—family—but you do not break blood ties. We may not wish to live together at all times, but we will always be with each other.

Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. Return to the root and you will find Meaning.

in 1911, an "Amazon" meant any woman rebel—which, to a lot of people, meant any girl who left home and went to college.

would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious happy and free America."17 Americans' deepest and most abiding divide turned on this starkly different reading of their Constitution, in what meaning lay between the ink written onto parchment and the scars etched on a black man's back.

Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?

sometimes it is necessary for us all to pretend together that language can really mean.

The point is that all of life is "pointless"—vanity or emptiness—unless something else is involved that transcends the pointlessness.

He was right. Without God at the center, it is hopeless; it is empty; and it was designed by God to be so. The theme of Ecclesiastes could be stated, "Life is supposed to taste like cardboard if you insist on eating the box!