Quotes About Significance

Watch for the phrase that was almost your "middle name"—the one they would put on your gravestone if given half a chance.

The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.

No life should pass unnoticed.

Teachers are often, and understandably, impatient for their students to develop clear and adequate ideas. But putting ideas in relation to each other isn't a simple job. It's confusing and this confusion does take time. All of us need time for our confusion if we are to build the breadth and depth that give significance to our knowledge.

I'm so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

unless time is good for something it is good for nothing.

Just as there are no little people or unimportant lives, there is no insignificant work.

Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.

Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.

he's no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else.

para el que no es nadie convertirse en alguien es más importante que cualquier otra cosa.

Then he added, in an almost threatening tone: Without these rasping hands, professor, not a chair would exist, or a building, a car, nothing, not even you; if we workers stopped working everything would stop, the sky would fall to earth and the earth would shoot up the sky, the plants would take over the cities, the Arno would flood your fine houses, and only those who have always worked would know how to survive, and as for you two, you with all your books, the dogs would tear you to pieces.

That he's no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else.

I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.

De dónde llegan las fechas y a dónde van? Viajan un año entero y con la precisión de una saeta se clavan en el día señalado, nos muestran un pasado, un presente en el espacio, nos deslumbran y se apagan.

De dónde llegan las fechas y a dónde van? Viajan un año entero y con la precisión de una saeta se clavan en el día señalado, nos muestran un pasado, presente en el espacio, nos deslumbran y se apagan. Se levantan puntuales de un tiempo invisible y en un instante recuperamos el fragmento de un gesto, la torre de una ciudad olvidada, las frases de los héroes disecadas en los libros o el asombro de la mañana del bautizo cuando nos dieron nombre.

People's fates are simplified by their names.

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.

The existence of such objects also supports the suggestion made in the Introduction that human beings are directed toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal. These very early manifestations of investing impersonal objects with significance are evidence that man was not born for love alone. The meaning attaching to such objects may later become invested in objects of scientific enquiry, or in any of the manifold aspects of the external world which engage adult attention.

Both distinguished musicians are claiming a special fundamental significance for the Western tonal system, on the grounds that it is rooted in a natural order of things

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.