Quotes About Meaning

After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages;

I was always conscious of sounds in nature which my ears could never hear,—that I caught but the prelude to a strain. She always retreats as I advance. Away behind and behind is she and her meaning. Will not this faith and expectation make to itself ears at length?

He teaches how to void excrement and urine and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or something to be.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.

Yo creo que no hay nada, ni tan siquiera el crimen, más opuesto a la poesía, a la filosofía, a la vida misma, que este incesante trabajar.

La mayoría de los hombres lleva vidas de tranquila desesperación. Lo que se llama resignación es desesperación confirmada.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.

You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments when you really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

Why do we want to live for ever? Because we hope that tomorrow will bring us someone we can love. Because we want to live another day with the person we love beside us. Because we want to find someone who deserves our Love and who, in turn, will know how to love us as we deserve to be loved. That is why, when a man has no one to love him, he feels a great desire to die. As long as he has friends, people who love him and whom he loves too, he will live. Because to live is to love.

You will find as you look upon your life that the moments that you truely live are the moments you have done things in the spirit of love

I cannot answer the question, 'Who am I?' except in terms of some sort of statement of the plans and purposes of my life," said Josiah Royce seventy years ago in The Philosophy of Loyalty. "I should say that a person, an individual self, may be defined as a human life lived according to a plan . . .

If thou hast seen all these without knowing what beauty is, thou hast no eyes; if without feeling its power, thou hast no heart.

in which the captain, with great learning, proved to Mr Allworthy, that the word charity in Scripture nowhere means beneficence or generosity.

impossible; a word which, in common conversation, is often used to signify not only improbable, but often what is really very likely, and, sometimes, what hath certainly happened; an hyperbolical violence like that which is so frequently offered to the words infinite and eternal; by the former of which it is usual to express a distance of half a yard, and by the latter, a duration of five minutes. And thus it is as usual to assert the impossibility of losing what is already actually lost.

Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction—the collectivity, the "nation"—and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

By the time she had grown sharper,..., she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play.

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whilst with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.

There's no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won't say that if you refuse me you'll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.