Quotes About Meaning

The word 'color' means at its origin to 'cover' or 'hide.' Matter eats up light and 'covers' it with a confusion of color.

This linguistic work, however, is not all that they do. They also function in intentionality: the syntax of language is related to the way things can present themselves to us, to the way we can intend and articulate them.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

History, then, is perceived as a rational process, the unfolding of a design, something with a dynamic to be uncovered.

Only in service to others, or God, could one be truly happy, unless that service was undertaken with a desire for status, power or wealth, and then the void would swallow you whole.

Once we know, on a deep level, that we must die, we choose, in various ways, purposely to give up our life in order to dispel the unbearable feelings of helplessness and dread.

The main fact of life for me is love or its absence. Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life. Without a sense of it, or even the memory…of it, I think I would lose heart completely. (p. vii)

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?

Questions are usually more beautiful, more significant than their resolutions, which in fact never resolve them, are never sufficient to satisfy us, whereas from a question streams a wonderful fragrance.

Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there's more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles - some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as "divine" in some sense of the word?

William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off.

Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deft deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text's literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.

La percepción es un proceso activo que constantemente está construyendo modelos del mundo. Esa es una de las razones por las que cada persona ve cosas diferentes en los manchones abstractos de tinta utilizados en las pruebas de Rorschach: nuestra mente trata de convertir incluso los patrones más ambiguos en algo que tenga sentido. Nos gusta tener una historia sobre lo que son y lo que significan las cosas.

Entonces, la idea es que todo lo significativo que vemos en el mundo es algo que nosotros sobreimponemos en él?». «Exactamente»

Buying something ultimately comes down to feeling good about the purchase.

Still, suppose—just as a thought experiment—that your goal wasn't living as long as possible but rather attaining the

The absence of meaning is not a call to despair or an invitation to leap joyfully into the abyss. Instead, the world's stubborn silence leads us to acknowledge our common predicament and spurs us to rebel against it.

Absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world.

Estoy muerto y quiero vivir. Esa es la verdad.

Cuánta desolación. La claridad azul remachaba en el alma la monotonía de toda nuestra vida, cavilaba hedionda, taciturna.

Siempre la misma vida: estarse reventando para nada. Decime, Rengo, ¿tiene sentido esta vida? Trabajamos para comer y comemos para trabajar. "Minga" de alegría, "minga" de fiestas, y todos los días lo mismo, Rengo. Esto "esgunfia" ya. —Cierto, Rubio, tenés razón... ¿Así que te animás? —Sí. —Entonces esta noche damos el golpe.