Quotes About Meaning

These things we hold on to, they are more than just things. They prove our history, who we are, where we came from.

The ring was real, the ring was fake. The ring was a symbol for everything, the ring was just a ring. All of these stories are true. None of these stories are true. More than one thing can be true at once.

I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.

If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us .

It seems unlikely that so much literature could be made from twenty-six letters. Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled down to one sentence?

I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.

Don't speak of your Protestant minister, Nor of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his temple Was the bollocks of Henry VIII Brendan Behan

When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead. When God gets relegated to second place behind any bauble or trinket, I have swapped the pearl of great price for painted fragments of glass.

The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy.

In philosophy, the opposite of truth is error; in Scripture, the opposite of truth is a lie.

All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and witness. If He wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is His concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that.

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.6

According to Viktor Frankl, a person finds identity only to the extent that "he commits himself to something beyond himself, to a cause greater than himself."4 The meaning of our lives emerges in the surrender of ourselves to an adventure of becoming who we are not yet.

I think we read memoirs hoping that someone has found an answer in his or her own life that can make sense of ours. The

It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.

When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead.

Presence, you will delight in the discovery of what it means to live by grace and not by performance.

All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the

Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness. —Rilke

Words, like anything else used too often, soon depreciate in value, lose their edge, and cease to bite into our lives. When phrases, such as unconditional love, trip too easily off the tongue, the speaker's ego may experience a temporary rush of exhilaration using an in salvation slogan, but his heart remains unchanged.

The confession of John the apostle that God is love is the fundamental meaning of the holy and adorable Trinity. Put bluntly, God is sheer Being-in-Love and there was never a time when God was not love. The foundation of the furious longing of God is the Father who is the originating Lover, the Son who is the full self-expression of that Love, and the Spirit who is the original and inexhaustible activity of that Love, drawing the created universe into itself.

But this road doesn't go anywhere," I told him. "That doesn't matter." "What does?" I asked, after a little while. "Just that we're on it, dude," he said.

Tell the truth, but understand that it is not necessarily what happened," is one of the things she told him. "Every good story is a parable," is another.

Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own.