Quotes About Meaning

How strangely people live. They seem to be in command of the situation and they do not understand that they have been given the chance of living and actually using the opportunity to be free. Everything in this life is terrible, apart from the freedom of will that we possess.

What passes for art today is for the most part a demonstration of itself, for it is a fallacy to suppose that method can become the meaning and aim of art. Nonetheless, most modern artists spend their time self-indulgently demonstrating method.

I want to underline my own belief that art must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition to it—otherwise life would become impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

what makes an object beautiful has nothing to do with its usefulness or its exchange value.

who says dog means dog?

Doctrines, though useful, are the product of analytical dissection; they recast the original, equivocal, historical material into abstract, less fully realized categories of meaning. In short, doctrines are not as richly meaningful as that which they are doctrines about.

We are given no escape from ultimate questions. In one way or another they are in us, whether we like it or not. Scientific truth is exact, but it is incomplete.

For him there had to be a reason for everything; it had to make sense – and to make one sense, not two.

You're communicating only if you're conveying information.

It is ten per cent how you draw, and ninety per cent what you draw.

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life." . . . "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." JOHN 6:63, 68 (NKJV)

What is love, Arthur? What is it?" she asks him. "Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?

Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for?

But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Because it is also mine.

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want.

Così comincerò dalla fine, dicendovi che siamo tutti il grande amore di qualcuno

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.

After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, you need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. Evincing a better self, in response to things that have caused you hurt.

There are fine but important distinctions between wanting to be dead, wanting to die, and wanting to kill yourself.

We can endure great pain if we believe it's purposeful.

Forge meaning, build identity and then invite the world to share your joy

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.