Quotes About Significance

Knowing that death is not far off brings remarkable clarity. After that news, there is no middle ground; something is either very important or not important at all.

The worldly scope and scale of your unique mission is irrelevant; what matters is that you embrace the role that is especially suited to you.

You will only ever see less than one percent of the impact you have on people's lives.

All at once I felt myself haunted by a terrible vision, of a world without guidance: a land of emptiness, where all was ruled by the madness of chance. How could one endure such a place, where all significance was lost? I myself would mean nothing, but would merely be a kind of self-invention: a speck upon the wind, calling itself Wilson. I felt my spirit waver, as if it were toppling into the abyss before me.

Everett found to his chagrin that questions that appeared minor gained incredible staying power and significance from even the most tenuous connection to slavery.

The most important people in this man's life - the people who have mattered to him most - aren't my Mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.

Some readers will say that animals awaken fantasy, if not heresy, in those who attach moral significance to them. Yet often I think it is the more violent among us who are living out the fantasy, some delusion in which everything in nature is nothing and all is permitted.

I'm walking this over to you, I'm talking to you, which means this is important.

History is a more or less bunk, the only history that is worth a damn is what we make today.

When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.

They who were so important, who wanted to create the world, are dumbfounded; everything crumbles.

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

We are all apt to fall into the error of assuming that other people think we are as important as we do ourselves; but unless there is some particular reason for their remembering it, others forget what has happened to us very quickly; and, even if they have not forgotten, their memories attach much less weight to it than we are inclined to believe.

For what are in reality the things we call 'Wisdom,' 'Virtue,' 'Heroism,' 'sublime hours,' and 'great moments of life,' but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; …

A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Death has come and atoned for all. I have no grievance against the soul of the man before me. Instinctively do I recognise that it soars high above the gravest faults and the cruellest wrongs (and how admirable and full of significance is this instinct!). If there linger still a regret within me, it is not that I am unable to inflict suffering in my turn, but it is perhaps that my love was not great enough and that my forgiveness has come too late. …

With the first sign, a halo of the possible appears, which was not contained in the first sign and which was unforeseeable from it,

Saussure may show that each act of expression becomes significant only as a modulation of a general system of expression and only insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures. The marvel is that before Saussure we did not know anything about this, and that we forget it again each time we speak--to begin with when we speak of Saussure's ideas.

History has no single signification; what we do always has several senses, and this is how an existential conception of history is distinguished from both materialism and spiritualism.

What is required by the facts which Freud describes under the name of repression, complex, regression or resistance is only the possibility of a fragmented life of consciousness which does not possess a unique significance at all times.

Meaning gives force and the more meaning this work has for you the more it will affect you emotionally and the more force will you obtain from it. For it is from the awakening of the emotional centre that the greatest force is derived.

Bliss in that age was it to be alive.' (He says) 'Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?

If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If He had a wallet, your photo would be in it. He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning... Face it, friend. He is crazy about you!

Remember, you are special because I made you. And I don't make mistakes.