Quotes About Meaning

The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217]

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time- the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that THAT was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

That's a weak definition of narrative. That's saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

I felt a great need to tell him how I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren't commensurate to me in any way.

The Other," I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. "That's

Yes: understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare. And weren't the two related?

Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

Nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so much that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You're going to die without it. You're never going to get it. You're going to die. Here it is.

I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

This Life is More than Just a read through.

A certain amount of volatility and drama can me healthy and keep things fun and interesting if you're willing at any moment during a fight to say, 'This means nothing. I love you, let's forget about it.

The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning.

Atheism is having the weight of doubt lifted, just to be replaced with the weight of mortality.

Words are a means to an end. Those who chase after them inevitably fail to reach that end.

The desire for continuity is a side-effect of the consciousness of mortality. The desire for meaning is a side-effect of the consciousness of triviality. Hence, consciousness is paid for with an exaggerated focus on sex and work; and those of us who ponder life find these two topics creeping into every discussion.

Somethingism is better than nihilism.

No philosopher was ever apathetic. If there is no love, it is not philosophy.