Quotes About Meaning

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless

Lord, today I ask for a renewed sense of purpose in my smaller daily choices, knowing that how I spend each moment is how I live my life. Every choice matters.

We could go to the extreme of giving away everything we have to feed, clothe, and house the poor, or we could sacrifice ourselves in the most heroic of ways, even our body or our life, but if we don't do those things out of a heart of pure love, they won't profit us in any way (1 Corinthians 13:3). Love is what gives meaning to all that we do.

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don't have language for. What fascinates me about that is we're talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It's almost a paradox that you're seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn't have language for it.

Politics was always centrally about identity and belonging and meaning, but in the decades following World War II, democracy operated within constraints with regard to a shared set of institutional statements about reality.

Today in the Trump era, many conservatives who believe Trump has denigrated all political discourse and destroyed any meaning of conservatism—which, of course, he has—look back longingly at the National Review as being everything that Trump World is not: clever, erudite, committed to principle.

When it comes to work, it isn't so much what we do or how much we're paid; it's the satisfaction we take in doing it.

There's something inherent in human nature that has us constructing narratives to explain a world that is otherwise chaotic and opaque. Life is little more than a series of overlapping stories about who we are, where we came from, and how we struggle to survive. What we call news isn't news at all: wars, murders, famines, plagues—death in all its forms. It's folly to assign meaning to every chance event, yet we do it all the time.

Everything happens for a reason but that doesn't mean there is a point.

Sometimes the import of a minor moment makes all the difference.

There's no point to anything if you get right down to it. We could all blow out brains out, but we don't.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. —Ken Kesey   Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense. —e. e. cummings

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself Beloved on the Earth." —Raymond Carver

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University makes the point that, "In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you are playing.

couples' conflicts assume their true meaning: they are frightened protests against eroding connection and a demand for emotional reengagement.

He had fought for me when i needed it.And I had to fight for him when he couldn't fight for himself.Perhaps that was the meaning of friendship.Perhaps the only true one.

She's thinking, it seems, of the course of her life; she's wondering, perhaps, if her story makes sense, if it means anything, or amounts to anything.

Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn't just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence." She smiled at Edith. "I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people-- Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't... August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.

You know, some things don't matter that much...Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart - now, that matters.

How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling betrayals of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

August says to Lily, You know some things don't matter that much Lily. Like the colour of the house. How big is that in overall scheme of life? But lifiting person's heart- now that matters. The whole problem with people is – they know what matters but they don't choose it. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters