Quotes About Meaning

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive... from Crow and Weasel

we have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep. But real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.-Barry Lopez, Interview with Bill Moyers, Journal, April 30, 2010

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results.

to be satisfied with our work, we typically need a belief in the purpose of what we do. Amy

NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" His point was that everything in life is choice.

Following the other suggestions I've made may sometimes mean that when judged by an absolute standard, the results of decisions will be less good than they might otherwise have been—all the more reason to fight the tendency to make social comparisons. So: Remember that "He who dies with the most toys wins" is a bumper sticker, not wisdom. Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life.

If we design workplaces that permit people to find meaning in their work, we will be designing a human nature that values work

If we make our own meanings, God will oblige us to answer our own questions: He will leave us in the void without the comfort of his word.

Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.

To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story.

As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God.

If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don't have the very words of scripture?

This is the only verse in the entire Old Testament that uses the term "everlasting life.

what the book of Revelation actually does say and how it says it, matters surprisingly overlooked by many so-called experts on biblical prophecy.

The exaltation (of Jesus by crucifixion) is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both 'God' and 'with God' in his preincarnate state as a divine being.

The word synoptic means "seen together":

The Christian religion is founded on the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. And it appears virtually certain that it was Mary Magdalene of all people, an otherwise unknown Galilean Jewish woman of means, who first propounded this belief. It is not at all farfetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity.

apocalypses, in which an author is given a secret revelation about the divine, heavenly mysteries that can make sense of the mundane, earthly realities.

But there are some rare terms that simply don't have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them.

apostles" (i.e., those sent on a mission)

propositional statements

That is, by showing what happens after death, the texts emphasize what matters in life, providing insight into the purpose, meaning, and goals of human existence so as to encourage certain ways of being and living in the world: attitudes, dispositions, priorities, commitments, life choices, beliefs, practices, public activities, relationships—in fact, almost everything involved with being a sentient and conscious human being.

especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society.