Quotes About Meaning

she takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: 'Is this just a joke or does she really mean it?

Stories aren't about things. Stories are things. Stories aren't about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.

what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express…

What does the body matter if the soul is dead?

Search all you will for retribution or meaning to your life, but until you find God, you live in vain.

Who are you to say whether she is of use? She is alive! That is statement enough.

Blinding light filled the darkness. Someone clasped his wrist, lifting him, and in the midst of hell's cacophony, whispered, I am.

Silence did not always mean indifference

The word progressive, for example. It will never be known, said Charles Peguy, ''what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive. Yet the word is meaningless until we add meaning to it. It suggests movement in the right direction, but we have no idea what direction that is until we learn what goal we are progressing towards and why we should move toward it. Progressives seldom say; they just assume that everyone knows.

Those distractions combine with a desire to avoid considering our own mortality, so that days, weeks, months, or even years can easily pass where no serious consideration is given to the eternal questions of human existence.

So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own.

Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

If he was nothing, or almost nothing, with no idea of where he had come from or where he was going, why he was living or what he was supposed to be doing (the piano only an elusive hint), and if, further, he was buffeted by forces he could not name but which were loneliness, sadness, longing, anger, fear, and spiritual nausea, would he not deeply attend the infinite story of life? Would he not pay the fucking twenty-five cents to get into the cathedral and see the light?

Deathbed speeches in novels. The soprano bares her soul and collapses on the divan. Citizen Kane and his Rosebud. That's what we want, I guess. Some message, some meaning expressed in the last moments. What better time for it all to make sense than at the end? But it doesn't make sense." He opened his eyes. "The last moments are the same as any other moments. There is no special wisdom.

So what do you do while you're living? Staying alive is nice, but you can't do that forever. It's how you live the life you have while you have it.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it.

Words can carry any burden we wish. All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.

Beware jargon. It usually hides ignorance and carries little knowledge.

And the question of Wester religion," Flattery said, "is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?

The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year's price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.

I remember friends from wars all but we forgot. All of them distilled into each wound we caught. Those wounds are all painful places where we fought. Battles never left behind, ones we never sought. What is it that we spent and what was it we bought?

Ima trava okolo! I korenja okolo!" Jessica translated silently: "These are ashes! And these are roots!