Quotes About Meaning

I always wanted a great love affair: something that feels big and full, really honest, and enough. No moment should feel slight, false, or a little off. For me, it had to be everything.

I believe that each person can make a difference, but it's so slight that there's basically no point.

Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.

I don't believe songs that try to say everything in a simple slogan.

Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.

I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally.

My mom is quite religious, and she got the name Tituss from the Bible. It's one of the smallest books in the Bible. I don't know why she added an 's,' but she just did.

From a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter.

When I listen to songs, I can smell a rat. I like songs that speak to me with some deeper truth.

If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

If somebody asks for a photo, with a smile, it is nothing.

Basically no, I mean I think that it's very easy to like I say, smoke a joint or even to wear a Chairman Mao button, or do a lot of these things with out knowing what's behind it, and what it really means.

If you don't believe in what you're doing, if you don't feel comfortable, or you're not meaning what you're saying, no matter if you love it or not - you can still connect with a song, but if you don't, I feel like people can easily sniff that out.

I'm not sure what 'cheeky' means. I hear it used so much and in so many different ways, I can't identify the real meaning of it.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

existential distress

Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.

I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life's events. Yet randomness is ever present.

The arts are not frosting but baking soda.

O-karada o daiji ni," Ali said quietly, kissing Pope on the cheek as she passed him by. A beautiful Japanese phrase, it meant "take care of yourself." But, literally translated, it was "your body is precious.

Justice is relative to social meanings. A given society is just if its substantive life is lived in a certain way, in a way that is faithful to the shared understandings of the members.

Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will - Montaigne, Essays