Quotes About Meaning

The most important thing to him is his drive, his purpose, his desire to give meaning to the experience of dying.

Rather than giving in to meaninglessness and despair, Christian artists know that there is a way out. Thus they create images of grace, awakening a desire for the new heavens and the new earth by anticipating the possibilities of redemption in Christ.

When I lifted up the Bible as my ultimate authority, I made my leather-bound, gold-engraved Bible into a paper calf.

But if religion is more than the attainment of power and privilege, if it is the doorway into beauty and mystery and meaning, then not only is divinity unnecessary but it is an impediment, for it implies that enlightenment is beyond the reach of mortals.

It is extraordinary that among these learned and professional men, only a deluded lunatic appears to have known the meaning of the word, and that from reading – or being told about – the work of a German sexologist. It is, perhaps, indicative of the general ignorance of sex (and, indeed, of the lower status of women)

What's that got to do with it?" Sam said. "A humorist is a man whose soul is black, black, but who turns his curdles of darkness into explosions of light. But when the light dies out, the black returns.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

I've come to believe that in life it's best to live for a purpose greater than oneself.

But I now had a keener appreciation of why people became Nazis in the first place; perhaps it was like he said: that they wanted to get away from dead-end, no-account places like Saarbrücken, wanted to achieve some sort of status among their fellow men, wanted their shitty, insignificant lives to mean something, even if they could find that meaning only in being mean to others—Jews, mostly, but anyone who didn't agree with them would do.

You've got me confused with some kind of saint, Noreen. The kind who's OK with being martyred as long as his halo's straight in the photograph. If I'm going to throw myself to the lions, I want it to mean a lot more than just being remembered in some milkmaid's prayers on a Sunday morning. I never was a man for a useless gesture.

Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Days What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.

Behind the glass, underneath the cellophane, remains your final summer – sweet And meaningless, and not to come again.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

How weightless words are when nothing will do. from "Gospel

to distinguish cases, and by their interpretation they can develop a substantial body of case law. In interpreting acts of Parliament, they traditionally have assumed Parliament to have meant what, on the face of it, the words of an act appear to mean. However, following a decision of the House of Lords (in its judicial capacity) in 1992, it is now possible for courts, where they consider it necessary, to look at the proceedings of Parliament in order to determine what Parliament really meant

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.' [Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.' [ Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005 ]

They're only stories," he would say, "What do stories matter?" But he wasn't stupid. He knew as well as Myrddin that in the end stories are all that matter.

The closest she had been to them was certain summer evenings when they had gone for picnics in the magravine's ice-barge -- simple family affairs, just Freya and Mama and Papa and about seventy servants and courtiers

The faith instinct…simply cannot be killed. That 'simply cannot' means that we simply cannot not live—cannot live as if life were meaningless, without purpose; as if life were merely material or mechanical or not spiritual. Such an effort in its deadly futility represents a historical ending time, a time just before the faith instinct will show itself again.