Quotes About Significance

There is nevertheless a value in painting these pictures of our desire; man's significances is that he can image a better world, and will some part of it at least into reality; man is an animal that makes Utopias. (Chapter on Plato p.47/543)

Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes. It is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.

One work of genius is worth a thousand commentaries.

There is, again, a "Multiplication of Effects": one cause may produce a vast variety of results, and help to differentiate the world; a word amiss, like Marie Antoinette's, or an altered telegram at Ems, or a wind at Salamis, may play an endless rôle in history.

Happenstance intersecting with received wisdom produces something entirely new and significant.

I'd been in New York for nearly eighteen months, now - though I still felt a transient, passing through, and that this apartment, this address, my job and my salary were very temporary aspects of my autobiography and whatever significance this sojourn would have in any retrospective view was impossible to discern.

I was wrong. I admit it. I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.

What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.

Beautiful lives women live—women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts—of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair—move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or any ability to hurt.

YaÅŸayan herhangi bir insan herhangi ölü bir insandan iyidir ama yaÅŸayan ya da ölü hiçbir insan baÅŸka bir yaÅŸayan ya da ölü insandan çok daha iyi deÄŸildir.

We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world.

With nothing of value to show the fact will disappear. There is no fact but value.

I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started.

But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid - that had to mean something.

The old man nodded. "Now I can die." She glanced at him. "Don't." Her tone was surprisingly tender, and probably she sensed how important he really was to her, because when he did die, two years further on, she went right after, and most of the people who knew her well agreed it was the sudden lack of opposition that undid her.

He was actually quite happy, because it was only when he was requested to use his might that he felt he wasn't a bother to everybody.

Whether an observation is significant depends on what theories one already accepts.

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it

Christianity has a basic content, and that content matters.

He wanted to feel as if he were—to play on his famous line from On the Waterfront—a "contender," someone who mattered, someone who had fought the good fight. He wanted to feel as if he had made a difference, left a mark, and not just on acting. What he did not want to be was an "unthinker," the way he described those people who never examined themselves or their place in the world.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.