Quotes About Meaning

Shame, as an emotion, has a core meaning, in relating individuals to wider social groups and norms -- real or imagined.

With the last sentence Blyth stumbles across the credo of all adventurers, be they sailors, mountaineers, or explorers. The where and how is simply the means to burrow as deeply as posssible into oneself. It's the answer to the relentless question that floods the mind when the exercise becomes painful and severe: What am I doing here? What's the point?

Iconography, good iconography, strives to convey invisible reality in a visible form.

Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

What is the Spanish word for wife? Esposa. What is the Spanish word for handcuffs? Esposas. That's not a coincidence.

The parable is given to us, but at the same time its full wealth of meaning will never be fully mined. It is not reducible to some clear, singular, scientific formula but rather gives rise to a multitude of commentaries. In opposition to this, many Christian communities view the stories and parables of the Bible as raw material to be translated into a single, understandable meaning rather than experienced as infinitely rich treasures that can speak to us in a plurality of ways.

If we imagine that our words are like arrows, then we can say that those arrows always fall short of the heavenly realm to which we aim them. In short, an emerging discourse acknowledges that speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.

What if Jesus was not offering his followers an ethical system to follow, but rather was inviting them to enter into a life of love that transcends ethics, a life of liberty that dwells beyond religious laws?

Well," replied Jesus, "the pearl has no value if all you seek is its value. But if you renounce the value of the pearl and give up everything simply because you are captivated by its beauty, then, and only then, will you discover its true value.

The point of second naïveté is not to reach a position where one rejects academic debates but rather to provide a space in which readers can place these ongoing debates to one side so that they can attend to the transforming source of the text itself. It is this transforming source that we speak of when we speak of the Word of God.

For the Word, if it exists at all, does not simply dwell in the ink that marks the pages of the Bible and cannot be isolated in a dissection of the story into its constituent parts.

What is important about revelation is not that we seek to interpret it in the same way but rather that we all love it and are transformed by it. To fail to recognize this would be similar to an art critic saying that what is important when considering a piece of art is that we interpret it correctly rather than loving it and being challenged by it.

For just as one person's idol is another's icon, so one person's fable is another's parable.

authentic faith is expressed, not in the mere acceptance of a belief system, but in sacrificial, loving action.

no other person has ever lived your life. You may be wondering what will happen if you engage in this journey of emotionally healthy spirituality, if you take seriously God's purpose for you to increasingly live faithfully out of the life he has given you.

Parker Palmer lo expresa muy bien: Hay al menos una cosa que me ha quedado clara: el cuidado de sí mismo no es nunca un acto egoísta; sencillamente es una buena mayordomía del único don que tenemos; fui puesto en la tierra para poderles ofrecer ese don a los demás. Cada vez que podamos escuchar a nuestro verdadero yo y darle el cuidado que necesita, no lo hacemos solo para nosotros mismos, sino también para los muchos otros cuyas vidas tocamos.

In God's family, success is defined as being faithful to his purpose and plan for your life.

The code shows me what it does. It doesn't show me what it's supposed to do.

Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.

We have a new generation of very rich people who want to do more with their money than buy a lot of expensive toys. They want to live meaningful lives.

Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.

Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.

I am absolutely a believer. Faith and life are synonymous functions. If you don't believe, you can't finish a sentence, for example. Speechlessness is the clearest sign of depression. In this respect, depression and disbelief converge.