Quotes About Meaning

And he feels grateful that he has been left with this one substantial relic of all his years of service and thinks how sincerely he has deserved this. Yet he knows the world in which people deserve things or do not deserve them is passing away. Europe is at war. Fairness is now becoming a word without meaning.

You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole lifetime spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just any ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts to illustrate it.

The point is, there is no point." Philip spoke up surprisingly. "No one here gets out alive. And over a sufficient period of time, all choices tend to normalize on a curve of random distribution." "You mean if you wait long enough, nothing happens?

much theological discussion is wasted, not because the words used have no possible meaning, but because the people who use them don't mean anything by them.

I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

The meaning of a particular action of the hand was understood only in terms of the positioning of the entire body, the facial expression, and the direction of the glance.

Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience.

Dying in vain isn't really all that bad since nearly everyone does it. It's the living in vain you really have to watch out for.

Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.

History as it comes from the hand of God has a preordained meaning and direction, and it moves to a purpose neither decreed by man nor conducive to man's sin. As a result, man is in revolt against history. Man pits against history the imagination of his fallen heart.

at the brink of the end, have I really known what it means to be alive, to dance, to love, to fear and to want. But that's just what I want, not what I must do . . . And somehow, want it is enough. It's almost enough; wanting life so badly means that I have lived it, at least.

The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can't leave, you are in effect a captive.

What is the difference between an author and a writer? A writer, as we know, writes; an author has written. What does an author do? Auth? Authorize? An author authors. But never in the present tense. No one says, when asked what he or she is doing, "I'm authoring.

Live with inspired purpose and empowering enthusiasm. You are an immortal, spiritual being; live as you are meant to live.

Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religion may not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.

As a general pattern, suffering stimulates a quest for meaningful explanation.

People make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves

It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.

Good readers may struggle with a difficult text, but struggle is not the goal of reading. The goal is fluency. Meaning flows to the good reader. In the same way, writing should flow from the good writer, at least as an ideal. The

battle the clock with a set of focusing questions: Why does the story matter? What's the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world, the times we live in?

A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.

To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: "She smiled happily" and "She smiled sadly." Which one works best? The first seems weak because "smiled" contains the meaning of "happily." On the other hand, "sadly" changes the meaning.

From productive conversations with professional writers and editors. I once learned that only three behaviors set literate people apart. The first two are obvious: reading and writing; but the third surprised me: talking about how reading and writing work. Many of the tools came from great talk about the construction of stories and the distillation of meaning.