Quotes About Meaning

believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.

Making lives meaningful in old age is new. It therefore requires more imagination and invention than making them merely safe does.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror.

We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.

Our most cruel failure is in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognise that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them. The

We know the dance moves. You agree to become a patient, and I, the clinician, agree to try to fix you, whatever the improbability, the misery, the damage, or the cost. With this new way, in which we together try to figure out how to face mortality and preserve the fiber of a meaningful life, with its loyalties and individuality, we are plodding novices. We are going through a societal learning curve, one person

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

It's difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.

Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

La poesía no es un lujo

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Speaking at last becomes a vice, like drinking. And why speak, if words do not cloak thoughts ?

Qué es el amor? —preguntó Adèle mientras miraba la luna como si buscara la respuesta en el cielo. —Es la simpatía de las almas —susurró el abogado con una voz que parecía proceder del viento.

I do not believe in a hereafter; the child was my future life. That was my conception of immortality, and perhaps the only one that has any analogy in reality. If you take that away from me, you cut off my life. LAURA.

Eli: Freedom is what you make it. Solly: That's what I'm saying. You got to fight to make it mean something.

Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy.

My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.

I love you, she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.

I understand why sometimes people speak in cliches because sometimes there is no other way to describe something.

Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer's fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons. I

I'm tired of living in the shallow end of the pool.

The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying.