Quotes About Significance

Cuando más importante es una cosa, más parece que queramos callarla.

because the past had shaped the present, it was more important than the present

It's not how long it glows. It's not how long the light lasts. It's what it says while it's still visible.

When we attach value to things that aren't love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.

Meaning doesn't lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren't love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing.

Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste.

Place is not the background of archaeology—it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.

Anyone I may have used should feel happy that they even had a use. It's better than being useless.

It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.

When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting.

After a while she said, If you make a sound it's just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it's a word. It means something. It can't not mean something.

how can one human being mean so much to another human being in terms of peace and assurance, as if loyalty were as real as gravity.

Meaningless would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.

He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.

How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance.

All that purpose. Always on their way somewhere. You had to admire. Maybe a chirp meant "I exist!" and then "I exist!," as if it could matter.

I have always wondered if the Commandments should be read as occurring in order of importance. If that is correct, honoring your mother is more important than not committing murder. That seems remarkable, though I am open to the idea.

She said, "meaninglessness would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.

There was no reason for Doane to tie a ribbon on Marcelle's wrist, and that was why she laughed when he did it, and loved him for it.

How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.