Quotes About Meaning

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth"—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—"may be another profound truth.

Spelling a person's name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.

Painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity.

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives.

He felt there had to be 'something'. He felt human beings must create, each in their own way, and that it was only by the application of vision, only by making things, that we could transform the negative 'nothing'.

If I don't say the thought right I might destroy it.

When we have made an experience or a chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos.

When you make sense of something, it tends to disappear. It is only mystery which keeps things alive

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

had been an indispensable adviser to both Greenspan and me.

I told her that I was frustrated by market participants' inability to grasp the plain English meaning of my statement.

If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.

Without God, there is no right and wrong ... Anything goes. Life loses value, and with that loss of value comes a loss of societal strength.

Like the Bible, Aristotle didn't define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived.

Happiness is the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.

The modern mind rebels at this notion—the notion of something's virtue tied to its inherent purpose. Nature, we believe, is blind and valueless—we don't blame a snake for biting or a baby for crying. But that's not what the ancients meant by virtue. They didn't mean our modern moral sense of "virtue"—being a nice person, or something similarly vague. They meant fulfilling the telos for which you were created.

the best way to investigate the nature of human purpose was to look at reality itself, and attempt to discover the systems behind it. This made it imperative to investigate our universe in order to find a higher meaning.

That's death and life, you see. We all shine on. You just have to release your hearts, alert your senses, and pay attention. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice all the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you. Qualcuno ti ama. Somebody loves you.

In a critical sense, doing nothing can mean doing something. Inaction can be action and embracing this paradox can save your life.

God must have had a reason

These were her rituals, the rutines that made her feel alive and connected. Without them, where would she be? Lost

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it sis my duty ... This is my highest and best use as a human.

Every true history is contemporary history.