Quotes About Meaning

The main industry of queer Theorists is to intentionally conflate two meanings of "normative," and deliberately make strategic use of the moral understanding of the term to contrive problems with its descriptive meaning.

I never claimed to be the Chosen One. That was Qui-Gon. Even the Council doesn't believe it anymore, so why should you?" "Because I think you believe it," Obi-Wan said calmly. "I think you know in your heart that you're meant for something extraordinary." "And you, Master. What does your heart tell you you're meant for?" "Infinite sadness," Obi-Wan said, even while smiling.

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Without the Bible's bad news, its good news will have no meaning.

Yahweh is the central reality in the universe, and seeking to understand life apart from him is folly.

Celebrations] are the punctuation marks that make sense of the passage of time; without them, there are no beginnings and endings. Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.

Unless people can find meaning and purpose in their work, they are not likely to stick around very long or put in the effort required to make a difference. These feelings are particularly important for leaders to tap into during times of high uncertainty.

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

With God, we can be satisfied and fulfilled with very little, but without Him, all that we have will always be dry and deeply disappointing.

You do know that the West Bank means the West Bank of the Jordan River, don't you?

After "finding God in all things," the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a contemplative in action.

But it was true. I was constantly surprised how the storied names of biblical locales popped up in the most familiar of circumstances: on a simple map, on a graffitied street sign, or in everyday conversations. "The traffic to Bethlehem was terrible last night!" said a Jesuit over dinner one night. Which still didn't beat "Gehenna is lovely.

how do I find God?

Vocation is different from work or a job or even a career. You could say that work is the labor required to do a task. A job is the situation in which you do it. A career is the long-term trajectory or pattern of many jobs. But vocation is deeper than each of those concepts.

Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them.

It is our relationship to the symbol, the Word, that is important.

Any symbol system that does not encourage a transcendence becomes a prison.

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.

The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the rules of debate must remain constant.

We need a term that will stand in contrast to "power" as it acquires its meaning in finite play. Let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength.

A slave can have life only by giving it away. "He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (Jesus)

The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.

Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that "they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).

Just as the warmakers of Europe regularly melted down the bells to recast them into cannon, the metaphysicians have found the meaning of their myths and announced those meanings without their narrative resonance.