Quotes About Significance

Value begins where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange.

It's mainly the little things- all added up- that give us the final picture, that make the difference.

It is him, Random. Him. That's all.

If you ignore little things, they become big problems.

She did not notice that already, in her memory, those months […] of fretting and tardiness, quarrels and crooked seams, had been transmuted into something precious, to be remembered with yearning.

There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

è sterile ricondurre l'opera a qualcosa di puramente esplicito, perché allora non c'è, immediatamente, più nulla da dirne e perché la funzione dell'opera non può consistere nel chiudere le labbra di coloro che la leggono

Light reading (by this, I mean books of little importance) may amuse for the moment, but leaves nothing solid behind.

If the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.

You know who Nicolaus Copernicus is?" "Was," Walker said. "Some old astronomer. Polish, I think. Proved the earth goes around the sun." Reacher nodded. "And much more than that, by implication. He asked us all to consider how likely is it that we're at the absolute center of things? What are the odds? That what we're seeing is somehow exceptional? The very best or the very worst? It's an important philosophical point.

About where you are now," she said. "For years you've laughed off the small things, but they come so thick and fast that eventually you realize an avalanche is made up of small things. Snowflakes, right? Things don't get much smaller than that. Suddenly you realize that small things are big things.

And I wanted that - to come first in somebody's life. Isn't that what we all want?

Well, we all hold history differently inside us. For Swede such episodes retold themselves into a seamless and momentous narrative; she had a Homeric grasp on the significance of events, and still does; one of her recent letters asks, Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? (Perhaps it is, but I suspect she's not actually counting on me for an answer.)

The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? … The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player.

We do not lack devices for measuring these miserable days of ours, in which it should be our pleasure that they be not frittered away without leaving behind any memory of ourselves in the mind of men.

I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.

What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning-- and a child's more imporant than a joke, I hope. You couldn't deny that, even if you tried with both hands.

Must a name mean something? Alice asked doubtfully. Of course it must, Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh; my name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.

We CAN talk,' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to

What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice. 'Nothing,' said Alice. 'Nothing whatever?' persisted the King. 'Nothing whatever,' said Alice. 'That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning