Quotes About Meaning

Do not breathe simply to exist.

Our lives can only hold so much. If they're filled with one thing, they can't be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.

It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

And I think something is beautiful if it reveals something important about what it means to be alive.

Irony is the word I forget the meaning of immediately after I look it up, but I kind of feel like I live in a constant state of it.

That's the thing about speaking—you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.

But knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things.

I think something is art when it is created with intention. Serious intention. Even crazy intention. And I think something is beautiful if it reveals something important about what it means to be alive.

As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

There were three questions that no one answered or asked: "What constituted proof?" "What constituted need?" "Essential—to whom?

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . . and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

I had to originate a philosophical framework of my own, because my basic view of man and existence was theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I'm not capable of it." He turned to go. "And neither are you. Good night, Miss Taggart.

We do not know why we think of them. We do not know why, when we think of them, we feel of a sudden that the earth is good and that it is not a burden to live.

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence.

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Ellsworth asked: "Then, in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?

Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!

But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you. Me what? Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that.

That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved.

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . .

concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek.

Most people build as they live—as a matter of routine and senseless accident. But a few understand that building is a great symbol. We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. If

All work is an act of philosophy.

He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her.