Quotes About Significance

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.

What sort of people are they, to act thus?' Yedigei asked aloud; he was deeply upset. 'Everything on earth is important to them, except death.' Yet this thought gave him no peace. 'If death is nothing to them, then it follows that life also has no value for them. What is their purpose in life? For what and how do they live?

Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance!

An accurate but useless idea is still useless.

punch line: The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don't yet care about and something they do care about.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion is 1,000 times greater than 1,000,000. A billion seconds is 32 years.

to defy the forgettable flatness of everyday work and life by creating a few precious moments.

they'd saved 122,300 lives—the equivalent of throwing a life preserver to every man, woman, and child in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

in recalling an experience, we ignore most of what happened and focus instead on a few particular moments.

This is what we mean by "thinking in moments": to recognize where the prose of life needs punctuation.

Statistics aren't inherently helpful; it's the scale and context that make them so.

Some moments are vastly more meaningful than others. For tourists, the Popsicle Hotline is a 15-minute experience that pops out of the surrounding 2-week vacation. For students at YES Prep, Senior Signing Day is a single morning that rises above a 7-year journey.

Welcome to the most important work you'll ever do.

So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life.

In a world of infinite choice, not context content is king.

In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king.

Life should be about purpose and meaning and cause and fulfilling our personal, God-given destinies.

Our greatest fear should not be that we won't succeed, but rather that we will succeed at something that doesn't matter.

To succeed without meaning is not to succeed at all.

Hunger, it should be noted, is different from ambition. Where ambition is largely about self-aggrandizement, hunger is more about service and significance.

We should strive to matter as much as we possibly can and guard ourselves against the inevitable temptations that would cheapen our accomplishments.