Quotes About Meaning

When you can live forever what do you live for?

The word 'monster' [monstrum] derives from 'demonstrare,' meaning to show or to demonstrate. Heresy and evolutionary change are thus mere intrusions into a homogenous perception of reality. My vocation, I decided, would be to make my life an example. But of what?

Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.

The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through the patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.

Let me once again give you the principle I offered in chapter 2: If there is no God, there are no values; if there are no values, there is no meaning; and if there is no meaning, you are a turnip and will simply live for a while, die, and then go back to the soil from which you came.

When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.

The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

although the reason for the existence of women is obvious enough, nobody has any real idea what point there is in being a man. Men have however, made many attempts to justify their existence.

However precise the results offered by paternity testers, the truth was recognized by societies that flourished long before they appeared: that fatherhood means more than genes alone.

After you've spent four years kissing somebody's perineum, the subtext talks louder than words.

The baseline," Father Boyle says, "is to go where life is, and as long as this gives you meaning, why would you stop?

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.

Life is the definition you give to events that occur."

Live life with a purpose and live it full out."

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

it is not enough to know merely what the Bible says. In fact, that can be dangerous. What is essential is to understand what the Bible means.

To unlock your Bible so that you can understand its meaning and application to your own life, it is necessary to avoid reading the whole Bible through old covenant eyes that see rules to be obeyed. That's not what the Bible is about, and you will miss the point of Scripture altogether if you read it like an Old Covenant Jew who is still under the Law.

Hard work is painful when life is devoid of purpose. But when you live for something greater than yourself and the gratification of your own ego, then hard work becomes a labor of love.

The purpose of your existence is yours alone to discover.

Not believing that you have a purpose won't prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won't prevent you from tripping.

Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it's something you're tremendously passionate about.

If by dying for the cause you're going straight to Paradise to sit at your thundering god's right hand, death doesn't mean a whole lot." "Are people really that stupid?" "That's a rhetorical question, right?