Quotes About Meaning

Art is very much a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace. Art is not so much what we make, but how we relate to the world. Not a noun, but a verb. This puts art back in a position to be claimed by the many.

Their reasons don't mean anything unless I have a choice.

Since when," he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?

He might as well Be dead, for when you lose your happiness, I always say, you lose your life. You can dwell in state, have all the trappings of success and style, But if you can't enjoy them in your heart, What does it mean? If your joy in life's destroyed, You're left with a mirage. Shadows and ash.

The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it's up to us to make sense of it and give it value.

As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.

If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.

All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world. Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.

Life ends, and that's part of what makes it special. What exists is here, in front of us, what we can see and touch and affect. Our lives are not dress rehearsals in which we plan and are tested in anticipation of the real show to come. This is it, the only performance we're going to get to give, and it is what we make of it.

If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.

Survival in any meaningful sense is the key issue of our time

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

Everything is so finite but that's what makes our time and specific moments so important.

This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.

The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Cult movies are basically movies Hollywood missed the first time - that they should have gotten - and then the fans got it and made it successful.

If a film has a social message, it is very important for me to know what the message is and how it's going to be delivered, but it's not something I look for all the time.