Quotes About Meaning

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, aggression, and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full.

The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.

Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching†and waiting for us.

An impractical man--which he not only seems to be, but really is--will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea.

In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really know she had: a soul. What's that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.

We know so little", I said, "and there's so much to know. We live by taste and touch; we see only what is under our noses. There are solar systems up there above us, greater than our own; and whole universes in a drop of water. And time stretches out endlessly on every side. This earth, this ocean, this little moment of living, has no meaning by itself. . . Yesterday is just as true as today; only we forget.

We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on "survival" and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we'll find out soon enough anyway—how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?

What can we know? How we should act? What might we hope for?

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

For whatever you live is life.

a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

Every ounce of suffering has a purpose that God can use for good, if we only let Him.

You are neither meaningless nor alone. No, the outcome is nothing less than joy: unconditional, abiding joy that is not of this world, but which you will recognize and welcome more surely than anything you've ever known in your life.

There's something beyond one's self

There must be more to stones than science can account for. Every worker with stones intuitively knows this is so.

Eine jede Hoffnung ist ohne Sinn. Kein Mensch verfalle auf die Idee, auf die Erfüllung seiner Träume zu sinnen. Vielmehr soll er den Irrsinn des Hoffens begreifen. Hat er ihn begriffen, darf er hoffen. Wenn er dann noch träumen kann, hat sein Leben Sinn.

It is the absence of something that best teaches its value and meaning.

What was I supposed to do? Was I meant to be nothing but God? I had tried the God business and found it too limited. It was a job for a simple-minded egomaniac. There had to be something else for me to do – something more meaningful, more expressive of my true self. I am convinced of it! That is my problem, and that is the question I ask of you: What am I to do with myself?

These discussions are not just of historic interest. Keynes was the first economist to put uncertainty at the heart of the economic problem, and thus raise the issue of the scope and meaning of rationality in economics. Is rationality possible in an uncertain world, and how is it to be specified?