Quotes About Meaning

protect them from feeling "bad" at the cost of a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Personal meaning must be created, not accepted, and the process of creating it requires testing and experimentation. A false self will neither test nor experiment; it is a defense against experimenting.

Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.

The second component of intelligence involves the elegance of interpretations of the experiences of life.

Green sods are all their monuments; and yet it tells A nobler history than pillared piles, Or the eternal pyramids.

Few people may be consciously aware of the etymological origins of common words and phrases, but the essential metaphor-making process of comparing the unknown with the known is still vital and ongoing. This process is the way meaning was, is, and ever shall be made.

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

miracle it is to find the right words, words that carry soul accurately

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.

There's only one thing more important... and that is, after you've done what you set out to do, to feel that it's been worth doing.

Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to those choruses again.

As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.

The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

Whereas other models of the atonement tend to isolate the meaning of Jesus' death from other aspects of his life, the Christus Victor model (at least as I'm presently fleshing it out) sees every aspect of Christ life—from his incarnation to his resurrection—as being most fundamentally about one thing: victoriously manifesting the loving kingdom of God over and against the destructive, oppressive kingdom of Satan.

Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain, Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds; Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap, Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding. No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny, Life spurts from you, little world, and you regard it with disdain. Only bruised men sense your cruelty, men whose life has lost its meaning.

As Nietzsche said: 'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed by them.

This meant there could be no German rearmament; that meant there could be no equality of arms, and that in turn, by the convoluted logic of politics, meant there could be no disarmament.

Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.