Quotes About Meaning

WE ONLY KNOW two things for certain: "I am," and "I will die." Religion is our response. Whether it is spoken or unspoken, conscious or unconscious, inherited or chosen, we all have a religion of some sort or another, for religion is not merely a matter of belief or affiliation. It is a matter of how we chose to live.

Hope ... is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.1

The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.

I'm sure this is a diversionary ploy. But that doesn't mean it isn't real." -Abe Sapien

No way it's up to me to decide which life is "better." So if it isn't up to me...I don't get it, ma. How can a life be saved if a life is lost?

For wisest ends this universal Power Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life Subsists, by which we only live, all life Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd. Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct, That flame for propagation, soon would roll A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven.

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

You and IAre suddenly what the trees tryTo tell us we are:That their merely being thereMeans something; that soonWe may touch, love, explain.

Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.

I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.

You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living.

Communication opens the door to authenticity. A leader's presence affirms that what the leader says is an indication of what he or she believes. And when we sense that the leader means well, we will lend the leader our ears and will be inclined to follow his or her leadership.

I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.

History is concerned primarily with human phenomena, not with natural; and history is doubly human because, as an idea, it is man's creation, challenging him to transcend the limits of information about himself and to discover what he is by finding meaning in what he has done. In short, it is man's commentary on man.

Clarity believes in all of that. Because she's - well, you know her. Generous and kind and loves everyone - because she's that way, those ideas take on a particularly important meaning to her. She doesn't know... that it wasn't that she was good and kind because of the words, but that the words meant those things because she was good and kind.

The sciences paint an impersonal and objective account of the world, deliberately devoid of "meaning", telling us about origins and mechanics of life, by revealing nothing of the joys and sorrows of living.

Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.

These beliefs are partly drawn from Scripture, partly not, and the interplay between the surface meaning of the biblical text and the meanings that have been read into it is part of the fascination of biblical study. In

Wabe. Maybe it's initials for something like Will All Babies Expectorate.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.