Quotes About Significance

Somewhere else there might be very exotic biologies and technologies and societies. In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding, we are a little lonely; and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. We

Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare.

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

The decisions that we write off as momentary, insignificant, incidental, everyday encounters are exactly when we have a chance to define ourselves. To find beauty. To engage the world around us. To create memories.

I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.

meanings are neither randomly bestowed by readers, nor objectively there on the page in the sense that a watermark is.

Ideology is essentially a matter of meaning; but the condition of advanced capitalism, some would suggest, is one of pervasive non-meaning. The sway of utility and technology bleach social life of significance, subordinating use-value to the empty formalism of exchange-value.

Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...

Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is.

no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear we might not be.

Personal isn't the same as important.

But what's worth more than gold? Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren't you worth more than that?

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.

TO CHANGE THE FATE OF ONE INDIVIDUAL IS TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

He'd always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn't do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn't a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid.

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

It takes a long time for people like Vorbis to die. They leave echoes in history.

I mean, doesn't it change history even if you just tread on an ant?' 'For the ant, certainly,' said Qu.

You see, it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.