Quotes About Meaning

When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

I'm writing this in part to tell you that 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...

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.

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

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.

Why must we be left, the survivors picking among the flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?

So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to say to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn't really an answer to my question, We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though and I did no more baptising until I was ordained.

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say, I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for." (p 114)

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for." (Gilead, p 114)

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting.

i have thought about that very often - how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.

Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.

There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe.

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. Even though we are to do all we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

After a while she said, If you make a sound it's just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it's a word. It means something. It can't not mean something.

how can one human being mean so much to another human being in terms of peace and assurance, as if loyalty were as real as gravity.

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

She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all.

The word preacher comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention.