Quotes About Meaning

Stimulation is even more complicated because the same stimulus can have different meanings for different people. A crowded shopping mall at Christmastime may remind one person of happy family shopping excursions and create a warm holiday spirit. But another person may have been forced to go shopping with others, tried to buy gifts without enough money and no idea of what to purchase, had unhappy memories of past holidays, and so suffers intensely in malls at Christmas.

Following the thinking of Carl Jung, I see each life as an individuation process, one of discovering the particular question you were put on earth to answer.

Today many of us are artists and poets rather than prophets and seers, producing a kind of art that von Franz says "is generally only understood by later generations, as a representation of what was going on in the collective unconscious at that time.

Like so many of the bits of conversation I recall, the meanings hidden in childhood only become clear now that I write them down. Most were just small lessons, people trying to prove their virtue to each other, but because I wasn't supposed to be listening, I made things out to be more important than they were. Maybe that's why our childhoods seem so big, so resonant, while our adult years slip by like fish in the river Byk.

Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.

My father always used to say that when you die, if you've got five real friends, you've had a great life.

Homosexualidad.] La palabra me desagrada. No me gusta el hecho de que su formación sea irregular, y siempre he considerado que apesta a ciencia y a intelecto. Preferiría una palabra que oliera a vida corriente. (...) Sus raíces pertenecen a dos lenguas distintas: "Homo", que en griego significa "igual" y "sexual" que procesde de la palabra latiana para "sexo". Alguien la acuñó en el esiglo XIX y no logro imaginar en qué estaba pensando.

Just breathing isn't living!

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

unless time is good for something it is good for nothing.

You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time.

It is not more vacation we need — it is more vocation.

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?

Maybe I should tell her that things without a meaning are the most beautiful ones

What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts.

I recognized in them what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn't able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam; a mental conformation that didn't reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful.

en el mundo no había nada que ganar, que su vida estaba llena de aventuras diferentes y desatinadas igual que la mía, y que el tiempo sencillamente se escurre sin

reaccionaba explicándome, de hecho, que yo no había ganado nada, que en el mundo no había nada que ganar, que su vida estaba llena de aventuras diferentes y desatinadas igual que la mía, y que el tiempo sencillamente se escurre sin sentido alguno, y que era bonito solo vernos de vez en cuando para oír el sonido loco del cerebro de la una resonando dentro del sonido loco del cerebro de la otra.

Lo que antes le parecía insoportable, ahora la alegra. Tal vez debería decirle que las cosas carentes de sentido son las más hermosas

Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning.

The whole future---I thought---will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.