Quotes About Meaning

As long as there are ways we can serve, then we have a job to do.

We came here to co-create with God by extending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless, contrary to our nature, and ultimately painful.

Meaning doesn't lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren't love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing.

Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell

Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.

Friedrich Nietzsche, "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

And the soul craves meaning the way the body craves oxygen.

Life is deep, but our current politics is shallow. The history of this country is like the stuff of great art and philosophy, while our current politics is more on the level of gossip magazines. It is shallow and tawdry, an unworthy vehicle for grappling with the meaning of what we are going through. We need to think more deeply if we're to create more powerfully. We need to focus on a broader understanding of the American story and commit ourselves to rewriting it.

Durning the years when we were carelessly dismissing what we later came to see as the most important things in life, we kept crying out woefully that we were looking for meaning. All that time we were starved for meaning, we were lacking it for no other reason than we weren't ascribing meaning to the situations right in front of us! meaning isn't what a situation gives us; its what we give to a situation.

How could everybody think that this stupid game of "making it in the world"—which I was actually embarrassed I didn't know how to play—could be all there is to our being here?

Embracing joy heals depression. Then we become the ones who teach the meaning of joy to our children, as well as allowing them to teach it to us.

Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing.

We have become desensitized, in ways discussed earlier, to the electrifying power of the well-chosen word. But sometimes it breaks through like a ray of light through a cloud bank. We all know the experience of reading or perhaps writing a sentence that evokes with absolute laser-like precision a particular feeling, atmosphere, action, or thought which, being named, seems to take on brand-new life.

Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.

Place is not the background of archaeology—it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.

I've seen my own death in dreams like this and it's helped me appreciate life more. I've also seen my own life in dreams and it's helped me appreciate death more.

There's nothing like the feeling of knowing that you've made a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

I think art is the only thing that's spirtual in the world. And I refuse to be forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.

Without the threat of death there's no reason to live.

Anyone I may have used should feel happy that they even had a use. It's better than being useless.

if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same.