Quotes About Meaning

I was quite stuck by the Dali Lama's phrase of passing through difficulties. We often feel that suffering will engulf us, it that suffering will never end, but if we can realize that it, too, will pass, or as the Buddhists say, that it is impermanent, we can survive them more easily, and perhaps what we have to learn from them, find meaning in then, so that we come out the other side, not embittered but emboldened. The depth of our suffering can also result in the height of our joy.

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family.

Exactly! said Deep Thought. So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

The argument goes something like this: I refuse to prove that I exist, says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

How many roads must a man walk down?

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Who is this god person anyway?

What do you get if you multiply six by nine? Six by nine. Forty two. That's it. That's all there is. I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe

Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.

Forty-two! yelled Loonquawl. Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work? I checked it very thoroughly, said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.

Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason.

Hey, this is terrific! he said. Someone down there is trying to kill us! Terrific, said Arthur. But don't you see what this means? Yes. We are going to die. Yes, but apart from that. Apart from that?! It means we must be on to something! How soon can we get off it?

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.

Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

She shook her head in puzzlement. 'You're very strange,' she said. 'No, I'm very ordinary,' said Arthur,'but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I'm more differed from than differing.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact 42- and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat. What did "psychosassic" mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.

Trilllian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.