Quotes About Significance

How is it possible to reconcile the sense that the universe in which we have been cast has a significance when we are so aware of the jumbled trivia of day-to-day living? How is

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 Bolkonski'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.

The time for fooling himself was over: something new and dreadful was going on inside Ivan Ilyich, something significant, more significant than anything in his whole life. And he was the only one who knew it; the people around him didn't know, or didn't want to know-they thought that everything in the world was going on as before. This was what tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything.

Lumea este sus?inut? de rostirea cuvintelor.

I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.

what he is to the inscrutable God is what matters.

The units that we use reflect our own size. The origin of the meter seems to be that it was used to measure rope or cloth: it's about the distance from a person's nose to his or her outstretched fingers. A second is about as long as a heartbeat. And a kilogram is a nice weight to carry around. We use these units because they are convenient, but fundamental physics doesn't care that much about us. The

Nothing matters, and everything matters.

Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.

Does the use of the word "revelation" mean that reason has been left behind? Obviously not. Both the discovery by Kepler of a new pattern in the movement of the heavenly bodies and the disclosure to Moses of a personal calling become the starting point of a tradition of reasoning in which the significance of these disclosures is explored, developed, tested against new experience, and extended into further areas of thought.

It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian? The

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective. Something like that. Or otherwise what was the point?

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't.

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put

It's a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with "no way" trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.

Even if the rest of man's history were lost, the vocabularies, the grammars, and the literature of all his present languages would testify to a mind infinitely above the level of any other living creature's. And if some sudden mutation afflicting the progeny of the entire human race resulted in the birth of only deaf-mutes, the outcome would be almost as fatal to human existence as that of a nuclear chain reaction.

As I showed earlier, the idea of time is more important than any physical instrument invented for recording time;

If one asks why early man took so long to improve his technical skills and his material facilities, the answer must be: he concentrated upon the greatest of all utilities first. By his command of words he increasingly embraced every aspect of life and gave it significance as part of a larger whole he retained in his mind. Only within that whole could technics itself have significance. The pursuit of significance crowns every other human achievement.

What an old-fashioned rationalist would regard as 'meaning-less ritual' was rather, on this interpretation, the ancient foundation layer of all modes of order and significance.

To be famous these days with no grounding and no substance is not especially difficult. I urge you instead to seek to be relevant, to be agile and educated.

Emotions aren't just mindless urges; they contain thoughts about matters of importance.