Quotes About Significance

If a device would save in time 10% or bring about results worth 10% then its absence is worth 10%.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance.

Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.

People don't think their dreams amount to much, but when I ask them to examine them for common themes, they surprise themselves at how accurate they are! They see that their dreams have value.

There is, I believe, no person, however insignificant in the world, but, if an account of his life and adventures were committed to paper, would be entertaining in some degree: the follies of our own life, and those we are liable to be drawn into by others, will constantly afford matter for serious reflection.

Anything of spiritual significance that happens in your life will be a result of God's activity in you. He is infinitely more concerned with your life and your relationship with Him than you or I could possibly be.

Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?

Love..." she repeated slowly, in a musing voice, and suddenly, while disentangling the lace, she added: "The reason I dislike this word because it means such a great deal to me, far more than you can understand.

No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn't finished, but hasn't yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.

Although on a conscious level a man lives for himself, he is actually being used for the attainment of humanity's historical aims. A deed once done becomes irrevocable, and any action comes together over time with millions of actions performed by other people to create historical significance.

The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow creatures, are those that have remote consequences.

In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connexion with the event itself.

those moments when once and for all a man shows his worth and that his whole past has not been in vain but has been a preparation for those moments.

There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.

There were no other eyes in the world like them. In the whole world there was only one being able to unite in itself the universe and the meaning of life for him.

Birthdays are of no importance to a rational being. It's a day like any other on which one has to do one's work.

every man was conscious of his own insignificance, aware that he was but a grain of sand in that ocean of humanity, and yet at the same time had a sense of power as a part of that vast whole.

And Pierre's soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up Karataev's face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy.

The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science.

there is no subject so insignificant that it will not expand to infinity, if attention is concentrated on it.

The deeper we go in search of causes, the more of them we find, and each cause taken singly or whole series of causes present themselves to us as equally correct in themselves, and equally false in their insignificance in comparison with the enormity of the event, and equally false in their incapacity (without the participation of all other coinciding causes) to produce the event that took place.

As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time without male society, on Anatole's appearance all the three women of Prince Bolkonsky's household felt that their life had not been real till then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing, immediately increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have been passed in darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness full of significance.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.