Quotes About Meaning

The evolutionary argument for altruism could draw from [Victor] Frankl to argue that we need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival.

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there's another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world.

The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn't belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of creation of the world. Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.

What is the moral equivalent of war—not the equivalent of its carnage, its xenophobias, its savagery—but its urgency, its meaning, its solidarity? What else generates what he called the "civic temperament"?

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

Having been liberated from manual labour and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied.

It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.

A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone's trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That when you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive is a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet.

Another metaphorical moral seems built into these two structures, for the maze offers the confusions of free will without a clear destination, the labyrinth an inflexible route to salvation.

Like a life, a journey assumes a shape and a meaning that are only clear afterward, and like a journey, a life requires that you learn to let go of the plan when the actuality departs from it, to embrace what's arriving, let go of what's departing, to move forward and not get stuck. You can cover the same ground with entirely different purposes.

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care.

On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day.

Part of my own endeavor as a writer has been to find ways to value what is elusive and overlooked, to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, and—in John Berger's phrase—to find "another way of telling.

True love is not a crock, but patriotism is.

To lose such an important listener in life is like losing my shadow. With no shadow, does a person truly exist under the sun? With no listener, does a person really have a voice? Silence means so many things to human beings. Some of them are unbearable.

feel. Or you might plead that it was not slanderous because it was true. Even this is not always an acceptable defence, I should add. The truth can often be slanderous if it is put in certain ways. But still, it would be your best bet.

Aun la desgracia, para que pueda ser verdaderamente desgracia, tiene que contar con un instante de consuelo; de no ser así, ni siquiera tendría sentido como desgracia.

Wir müssen uns Milarepa als glücklichen Menschen vorstellen, so wie Albert Camus uns Sisyphos beschreibt. Auch mein Weg, mein Optimismus, mein Humor, meine Lebensfreude sind zuallererst der Fähigkeit geschuldet, Sinn zu stiften. Sind doch Sinn und das Absurde untrennbar miteinander verwoben. Wie Leben und Tod auch.

Auch die Sinnfrage stellt sich mir nicht mehr. Weil ich loszulassen gelernt habe. Wer den Sinn immerzu sucht, weil er abhandengekommen ist, wird ihn ebenso wenig finden wie das Glück. Beide sind verwurzelt und flüchtig zugleich. In uns selbst.