Quotes About Significance

To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?

In the end it didn't matter of course.

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It

only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside. (165)

The moment passed in a heartbeat. But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments — which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story.

But the fact of eight deaths must mean something, right?

For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.

The message, however, was not lost on anyone.

it had wide influence.

Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here.

Kahneman termed the "Peak-End rule": an average of the pain experienced at just two moments—the single worst moment of the procedure and the very end. [...] Your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out.

For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me.

I can no longer read a magazine and throw it on the floor. In exchange, I get unlimited access to the one person I have met in my life whom I automatically felt was out of my league. My favorite human being, the single person I cherish above all others. This is the person I get to share the oxygen in the room with.

There's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.

You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.

Sacrifice does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious

It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed... the thing more inconceivable than one's death--never to have been born...

Only if one feels immensely important she had told him, can one feel truly light.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls. AYN RAND New York, May 1968