Quotes About Significance

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things. —ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

On the basis of what the New Testament does say, the final home should not be called "heaven" but instead the "new heavens and the new earth," and this makes a significant difference for understanding that what we do now really does matter—for we will continue doing it on the other side of life after death.

History creates context; context creates meaning.

What good is something that scales well if it sucks? Why is size the ultimate goal or even a goal at all?

While we have a universal measure of wealth called money, there is no comparable measurement for meaning.

take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.

Naming is power, you know. That's what they say at least. My parents exhausted universal power in first creating me and then in naming me. They created for me an identity whether I wanted one or not.

He gave our pain and struggles a holy significance, a redemptive power, which makes it a privilege for us to suffer with Christ.

We haven't even stopped to consider the fact that losing might not hurt anyone. What if, by shielding people in this way, we're stealing the transformational power of both winning and losing in their lives? The irony is that if you believe nothing matters in life, you will live a life that doesn't matter.

But she suspects that some people's courage stems from the fact that they attach little importance to themselves—and great importance to others. They see themselves as the cosmos might—small to the point of insignificant. But they let others loom large.

Our symbols aren't supposed to matter, but that's wishful thinking—symbols always matter.

You're all I care about," I said. "No. And me. The person I am when I'm with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I'm with you.

I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk.

It seems like we live and die by the names we are given, and we harm or heal by the names we give.

If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.

at a deeper level, our anthropocentrism manifests itself as a conviction that human beings somehow matter to the universe.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

Everything is so finite but that's what makes our time and specific moments so important.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

Sometimes, it is not the kings and queen who make for the most fascinating history but the shadowy souls who happen to be in the right place at the right time.