Quotes About Meaning

I'm not talking about fucking; I'm talking about intimacy. One used to fade into the other, and sometimes I forget I've learned the difference.

Details aren't automatically interesting.

For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn't worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a while and then relinquish it.

Of course language isn't enough.

These Fatalists preach that Chance and Peril are merely masks for Fate's workings, nothing in themselves, and moreover that all the gods move at Fate's bidding. Their followers take comfort in thinking that their every deed is meant to be; it excuses all manner of meanness.

He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous.

Our minds have to translate magic into symbols we understand.

It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses.

I think maybe heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.

What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop...

Is this all we've got now? No priests to say yes son, your suffering meant something, no kings on the battlefield to say yes soldier, your suffering meant something.

It shows the truth - that the real meaning of a word is only as powerful or harmless as the emotion behind it.

Without risk, we are automatons going through our days with no purpose or meaning. We are safer, perhaps, but we are also, ironically, closer to death.

I'm an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. It helps me understand the way I live.

In Wangechi Mutu's mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for "artist." The closest term is something like "magician" or "a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,

reiterates the author Polly Platt, which, of course, is exactly what I've

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they'd never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist's, were the truest things in it.

Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh ?'Ain't you pale!' she says ? but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.

She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.

As Nietzsche said, when we have a why we can handle any how.

In it she wrote, of her depression, "That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

There was a lot under those words. I'd go digging for it later.