Quotes About Meaning

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

And what my constitutional values are are wholly irrelevant to the job, and so neither you nor anyone else will know what they are.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

You have to want to be married to someone. You have to feel that reciprocated. Marriage for marriage's sake doesn't make any sense to me, and I found someone with whom I could put my money where my mouth is, I guess.

Neither James Madison, for whom this lecture is named, nor any of the other Framers of the Constitution, were oblivious, careless, or otherwise unaware of the words they chose for the document and its Bill of Rights.

Inner-life questions are the kind everyone asks, with or without benefit of God-talk: 'Does my life have meaning and purpose?' 'Do I have gifts that the world wants and needs?' 'Whom and what shall I serve?' 'Whom and what can I trust?' 'How can I rise above my fears?'

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

The label 'liberal' or 'conservative,' any - every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from 'Iolanthe.' It goes, 'Every gal and every boy that's born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.' What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

Republicans say they want citizenship to truly mean something. Let's be equal-opportunity about it and test everyone, including those very Republicans and others whose forbears came here generations ago.

There have been some very extreme hecklers in audiences whose bile was so hateful and so meant that it would be a bit frightening to think that all I'm doing is jokes and yet someone hates me that much.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understanding, personally, that is the most important thing.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.

You weren't born just to live a life and to die; you were born to accomplish something specifically. Matter of fact, success is making it to the end of your purpose; that is success... Success is not just existing. Success is making it to the end of why you were born.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Is it perfect? Absolutely not! But there was an audience for 'Wicked,' and our producers were smart enough to reach that audience.

Success is a funny thing. It means different things to different people. For me, I am always pleased when people connect to our brand. It means we are executing in a manner that speaks to a wide variety of businesses.

I'm glad I made a piece of art that can be interpreted so widely. Art is always interpreted subjectively.