Quotes About Meaning

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God—no small things—but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them.

Soon I was incorporating :( and ;) and ;( too and after that the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emotions with, and requiring them to carry the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life.

In the meantime, nothing sufficed, nothing was equal to the question, Why am I here?

out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing.

Terms don't define our lives; our lives define our terms.

But the Septuagint translated ason as exeikonismenon, meaning a fetus already "fully formed.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

I'd rather make a show 100 people need to see, than a show that 1000 people want to see.

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning—We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.

Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love." The first contained the root words "heart" and "hand" and "action"-love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for "passionate love," was formed of "heart," "to tell," and "a long thread.

I believe that God is (and must be) a transcendent presence in any worthy work of art.

And if, with some effort, they could recall the affairs that had been consummated, the roads taken, the languages mastered, the queer meals eaten in foreign lands, of what lasting consequence was that? This had been the destination all the while. Having been a good householder, having run a tight ship, having fought the good fight, whatever, it mattered not at all.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.

The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

All this suffering,' I said, 'and nothing but greed and violence to build on when the war is over.' 'Have another soda-mint,' said Charles. I had one. Then I said, 'Why are we here? That's what I don't understand. Why be here at all when it all has to be so beastly?' 'I suppose we just came, like mould on cheese.' 'Then why do we want to be happy? Mould on cheese doesn't want to be happy.' ...

The search for the divine in its simplest terms is the search for that portion of the creative universe that intersects with you personally.

Maybe loving her children too much was her downfall—the weight it placed on the three of them, knowing that for their mother they represented everything of greatest meaning in her life. No question their father loved them, too, but without the heavy sense of obligation her devotion seemed to carry with it.

In classical psychoanalytic theory hysterical symptoms refer to dysfunction when a body part or a sense organ takes on an unconscious symbolic meaning. For example, a patient's eyes or legs might be equated unconsciously with his or her sexual organs; in the case of massive inhibition of adult sexuality, an eye or a leg may appear not to function. There is no physiological damage; the affected organ is only hysterically paralyzed.

Ignoraba que estaba vacilando entre su verdadero nacimiento y la permanencia en la nada.