Quotes About Significance

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

You have never done enough, so long as it is still possible that you have something of value to contribute

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.

Someone who doesn't know history, he says, is "in the literal sense half-witted . . . He does not know what half his own words mean, or what half his own actions signify.

But after having been forgotten, G. K. Chesterton is now enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Why? Well, the obvious reason is that people are reading him again. The rediscovery of Chesterton has less to do with his importance as a figure from history than his significance in the present.

Telephones ringing at night are important.

There's no word worth your life.

I'm inspired by love, by the moments that we commit to something with all our heart - be it a person, a project, an animal, anything really. It's undeniably inspiring, that acknowledgment of existence, that I love, that I care. That fills me with purpose.

The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description.

I have lived all my life up to this moment, to come to this day. This moment...this day...is as good as any moment in all eternity.

Does it really matter how many people tune in to watch us?

We are before one gaze and His is the only one that counts.

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

Courage, the writer Ambrose Redmoon said, "is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.

A 27-year study concluded that living with purpose and meaning is the key to happiness and longevity.

Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.

It's easy to dismiss design - to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality. But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters - especially now.

Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.

Leave an imprint. You're young now. But when you get older and look back at your life, you'll ask yourself a whole bunch of questions. Did I make a difference? Did I contribute something? Did my being here matter? Dud I do something that left an imprint? I'm not asking you to end hunger or repair the ozone. But I am asking you to think about your purpose --- to recognize that your life isn't infinite, and that you should use your limited time here to do something that matters.

If you have a broken heart, it means you have done something big enough and important enough and valuable enough to have broken your heart.

Design—that is, utility enhanced by significance—has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success

Ponder that humble toaster. The typical person uses a toaster at most 15 minutes per day. The remaining 1,425 minutes of the day the toaster is on display. In other words, 1 percent of the toaster's time is devoted to utility, while 99 percent is devoted to significance. Why shouldn't it be beautiful, especially when you can buy a good-looking one for less than forty bucks?

if people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn't we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we are predictably irrational - and we clearly are- why couldn't we also be predictably transcendent?

Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you