Quotes About Significance

I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.

Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.

But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue, and in some way, preparing me for future events.

This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

I could not help mentioning this picture that had once meant so much to me; and to name the dead is always a kind of tribute to them: one I felt Mr. Deacon deserved.

The Misses Braby were twins who had shapeless faces on which the features seemed to have been placed fortuitously without any attempt at assembling them in such a way as to convey a significance.

The fastest way to feel connection, a sense of how significant your life is, a deep sense of certainty and variety, and put yourself in a state where you can give to others, is to find a way each day to appreciate more and expect less.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning we give it.

when you seek Significance, you're always comparing yourself with someone else. And there's always someone bigger, taller, stronger, faster, richer, funnier, younger, more handsome, more beautiful, with a bigger yacht, a nicer car, a nicer home.

Some very wealthy people gain significance by hiding their wealth.

The ultimate significance in life comes not from something external but from something internal. It comes from a sense of esteem for ourselves, which is not something we can ever get from someone else. People

It was a great thing,—a very great thing;—he had no hesitation in saying that it was one of the greatest things out.  He didn't believe a greater thing had ever come out.

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

It is undoubtedly the case that things often become complicated which, from the greatness of their importance, should have been kept clear as running water

The ubiquitous initials LSR for Luftschutzraum, or air-raid shelter, were said to stand for 'Lernt schnell Russisc': 'Learn Russian quickly'.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

Anything whose presence or absence makes no discernible difference is no essential part of the whole.

It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is — as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced.

They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important.

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth: learning and loving. Nothing else—not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake—can possibly have the same lasting value.

The world's history was a mass of such disconnected threads, and none could say which were important and which were trivial.

It had to happen to someone. There is nothing exceptional about you, any more than there is about the first neutron that starts the chain reaction in an atomic bomb. It simply happens to be the first. Any other neutron would have served