Quotes About Meaning

We have art, Nietzsche says, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

What I really lusted after was knowledge and understanding of the world. What had happened over the centuries? What was going on in the far reaches of this and other societies? What meaning, if any, did life have? Maybe that is why I became a social science professor and researcher. As such I cannot say I found the final answer to those sorts of questions.

We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.

Sartre puts it, value arises simply from our choices. What we choose, we value simply because we have chosen it (and apparently we remain scot-free at any moment to nonvalue it by simply un-choosing it). In other words, we do not choose (in his view) because we see the value of something. We see the value of something because we have chosen it.

But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan

nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?

Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion.

You've heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.

Can a recognition of one's shallowness qualify as a profound insight?

its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a heightened sense of purpose and consequence.

The Buddhists are probably right about chopping onions: It's all a matter of how you choose to see and experience it, as a chore to resist or a kind of path—a practice, even. Depending on the context, the very same activity can have diametrically opposed meanings.

a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical." Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn't reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth.

In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work so much as attentiveness.)

Alcoholism can be understood as a spiritual disorder, Ross told me the first time we met, in the treatment room at NYU. Over time you lose your connection to everything but this compound. Life loses all meaning. At the end, nothing is more important than that bottle, not even your wife and your kids. Eventually, there is nothing you won't sacrifice for it.

and spirituality. I asked him if he agreed with E. O. Wilson, who has written that all of us must ultimately choose: either the path of science or the path of spirituality

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.

Whenever you try to say something in a sincere way, it gets communicated no matter what the genre.

One of the great values of the theater is a communal search for truth; I believe that sincerely.

People don't really need to question our sincerity when it comes to our songs.

If you want me to sing this Christmas song with the feeling and the meaning, you better see if you can locate that check.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

If you want people to know what your message is, just sing it.