Quotes About Meaning

Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.

And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.

Humans and stories need each other.

Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference.

Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.

We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.

What's secretly in the water of modern culture is that people enter the world empty. That's a very dangerous idea, because if everybody's empty than other people can get us to do whatever they want because there's nothing in us to stand against it. But if we came to do something that's meaningful, that involves giving and making the world a more beautiful, healthy, lively place, then you become a difficult person to move around and manipulate.

To be purposeful is not to be goal oriented, but to seek to reconnect to the source of one's life.

That was a double negative, Jemail. By saying that you haven't seen nobody, you're actually saying that you have seen somebody.

Meaning, Elric? Do not seek that, for madness lies in such a course.

And that is one thing that no amount of freedom or "licence" or "permissiveness" or whatever the old fogies call it can cope with. That is the odd assumption found in the twentieth century (I wonder if you who read this will know what those two stupid words mean?):

And upon those three lies was Elric's destiny to be built, for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.

You spend your lives chasing that which is within you and that which you can find in any other human being - but you will not look for it there - you must follow more glamorous paths - to waste your time in order to discover that you have wasted your time.

To theorize' means, to see as a whole. The actual is a small part of the whole, or a single aspect of it, which, when taken by itself is, by reason of its incompleteness, both meaningless and comparatively unreal. To see the actual in its wholeness is to see it filled out with all that it implies, supplemented by that which gives it meaning.

the first rule of Moritz Haupt for interpreting the classics,—'Man soll nicht übersetzen.' ['Do not translate':

When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.

Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.

we order our lives with barely held stories

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.

Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they're much more tricky than violins.

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

my arms. The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.

But what did we really know, even of one another? We never thought of a future. Our small solar system - what was it heading towards? And how long would each of us mean something to the others?