Quotes About Meaning

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

if it doesn't matter what you do, then how do you choose what to do?

I have no word of yours to assure me that our brief friendship held for you the same significance it held for me, but I must go on believing so. Every hope of the future is meaningless unless I have faith that you and I will share it together.

And the written words were footsteps, feet running hard to another person.

If you think this life is all there is," he said, "then self-sacrifice must seem to you sheer insanity. If you do not think so then it is only common sense. It all depends on your point of view." (Hilary Eliot to David Eliot, Chapter 9)

sudden throb of triumph in Marianne's soul; for this, in spite of all, had been a man who had left the world the richer for his passing through it, and even if immortality were an empty dream, that were sufficient justification for the fact of life. He had lived for the poor and the outcast, he had served them up to the moment of his death, and she in whatever ways she could find would serve them too.

Her strong, warm clasp did not falter, but her panic grew. An abyss seemed opening at her feet too, as for the first time in her life she realized the meaning of death. However strong religious faith may be, death remains an abyss that swallows the familiar companion of everyday as though he had never been. It is the most awful fact of human life, and at the moment Marianne knew it not only with her mind but for the first time with her panic-stricken soul as well.

Home! It showed you its face when you sat quiet within it at that moment when day was passing to night, but it could only reveal its spirit, its eternal meaning, when you stood at a little distance, just turning to leave it or just returning to it, seeing it at that transition moment when a larger world was claiming or releasing you.

What we lose is any sense that life is alive, she thought. The days follow one after the other and everything passes us by. Then along comes someone who looks at us kindly, as if we were worth noticing, and life quickens.

Gustav's art isn't political," I said. "You of all people should know that." "All art is political. You of all people should know that.

in after life the most vivid impression of his cousin which Tom Ogilvy retained was the sight of her holding up a bun and laughing with great heartiness but apparently with no meaning.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Is this all there is to life? Will I always feel the same? Do I not have some purpose to fulfill, some greater kindness to give, some inner freedom to taste?

There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments.

logotherapy," which, in a nutshell, is about searching for the meaning packed in one's baggage, something

Frankl said that he wrote the book "to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." At

You have your soul—what Frankl called the last of the human freedoms, the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

You are living for the deeper truth hidden in the pain of circumstance—your soul's lessons packed in your chimidunchik.

the same secret we will all know when death is just a breath away: In the end, what will matter is how much we loved—our children, our mates, our families, our friends, everyone we knew, everyone who traveled with us during our brief visit to this unbearably lovely place. What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.