Quotes About Meaning

Atheists believe simplicity is a virtue when it is precisely this that weighs so heavily on their souls.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?' 'I don't know,' said Moreland. 'Love means such different things to different people.

Neurosis, he said, in the nearest he came to a definitive definition, is the suffering of a soul that has not found its meaning.

By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche.

Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

Words alone are never enough to convey meaning: prosody is an essential feature of adult verbal exchanges. Consider the exclamation 'Really!' It can imply surprise, disbelief, disapproval, enthusiasm, disdain, and perhaps many other meanings, each of which must be conveyed by intonation rather than by the word itself.

Othello's suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

Bowlby's statement that intimate attachments are the hub around which a person's life revolves, and Marris's assertion that specific relationships embody most crucially the meaning of a person's life, leave out of account not only interests, which may be crucially important, but also the need which many people feel for some scheme, religion, philosophy, or ideology which makes sense of life.

The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.

A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.

The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.

What is not clear is not French.

The one thing that matters is the effort. It continues, whereas the end to be attained is but an illusion of the climber, as he fares on and on from crest to crest; and once the goal is reached it has no meaning.

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life…. But what is that something?

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.

Man's "progress" is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning

A life without love in it is like a heap of ashes upon a deserted hearth, with Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

All men have the stars, but they do not mean the same things for different people. For some they are guides, for others, no more than little lights in the sky. But all these are silent. You--you alone have the stars as no one else has them

D'autre part la langue écrite, la langue littéraire, surchargée, pompeuse, pâteuse, prétentieuse, gorgée de digressions ineptes, absconse, évasive, allusive, ne réussissait qu'à lui transmettre un vilain bruit et de vilaines évidences très mal formulées (Black Village p. 123)

What about the way he tried to raise his arm while looking at Jeff? Did he remember that? What had he been trying to do? Signal? Beckon? Acknowledge? Thank? Even if everything that had happened at the beach was a blur, or a blank, Jeff had no doubt that somewhere in that man lingered a remnant of that canceled gesture.