Quotes About Meaning

valuation that is not backed up by a story is both soulless and untrustworthy and that we remember stories better than spreadsheets.

To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

Sam: So then what is art? Hally: You want a definition? Sam: Ja. Hally: [He realizes he has got to be careful. He gives the matter a lot of thought before answering.] Philosophers have been trying to do that for centuries. What is Art? What is Life? But basically I suppose it's... the giving of meaning to matter. Sam: Nothing to do with beautiful? Hally: It goes beyond that. It's the giving of form to the formless.

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.

Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.

Religious ceremonial nowadays provides less opportunity for bad language and sexual symbolism.

I like my name. My mom named me after a song by the 1970s group Bread. So, it's meaningful, and I like the song. It's a love song - kind of - but it's kind of depressing and dark.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.

Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.

Yes," I answered. But I stayed awake for the rest of that long, dark night, wondering what such a dream could possibly mean.

In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred.

a maior loucura é viver sem um sentido existencial. Sem sentido, vivemos por viver, a vida não tem brilho, o caos não nos amadurece, a cultura não nos remete à sabedoria. Sem propósito, a mesa, por mais farta que seja, nutre o corpo, mas deixa faminta a alma. Sem propósito, vivemos num campo de concentração mental, ainda que rodeados por jardins. Não tenha medo de morrer em Auschwitz, tenha medo de viver uma existência sem sentido.

Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible.

Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false.

The dictionary is an ossuary of empty words.

Quiero que en las palabras que escribes haya algo que me pertenezca. No te estoy dictando un cuenticulario de nimiedades. Historias de entretén-y-miento.

Words are dirty by nature.

I don't remember which writer of antiquity it is who speaks of an Old Woman-Devil, armed with a double set of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her sex. . . . What is the meaning of the vulva-with-teeth if not the devouring nonengendering principle of the woman?

Music can reach depths words can't.

I ask of life to shine meaning in everyone who is searching.

When words lose their meaning and their capacity to bind those who use them, neither democracy nor the rule of law can long survive.

When you doubt your ability to make a difference just remember you are alive for a reason.

Having supplied them with names, omnipotence, justice, knowledge, Providence, - what are they?