Quotes About Significance

It doesn't have to mean anything to you to mean something to me.

Suddenly, out of the mist came a parachute with a fresh Hershey chocolate bar from America. It took me a week to eat that candy bar. I hid it day and night. The chocolate was wonderful, but it wasn't the chocolate that was most important. What it meant was that someone in America cared. That parachute was something more important than candy. It represented hope. Hope that someday we would be free. Without hope the soul dies.

a man's identity (or that of a community) is nothing more than an unbroken rehearsal of contingencies, each at the mercy of circumstance and each significant in proportion to its familiarity.

significance could be found in a

Perhaps each life has one sensational thought, if acted upon will bring great meaning.

The surest symptoms of a wasted life are breathing, a pulse, and thinking...

Sometimes I wake at night and worry that I might have disappeared in my sleep. That's what happens when nobody cares about you. Bit by bit you begin to disappear until people look right through your chest and head like you're made of glass. It's not about love; it's about being forgotten. We only exist if others think about us. It is like that tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. Who the fuck cares except the birds?

Es ist mir egal, wie viel jemand auf der Bank hat - solange er kein Kind hat, besitzt er nichts von Wert.

this: I have never met anyone who is so central to my existence that life without her seems incomprehensible, who I care more about than I do myself.

The actions of a single person can change the course of the world and create history.

Siempre he sabido que los destinos de nuestros mundos, el tuyo y el mío, están a merced de las acciones de los individuos. Los hechos de una sola persona pueden alternar el curso de un mundo y crear historia. Y tú eres uno de esos individuos.

Historian Bernard DeVoto later called 1846 "the year of decision." Not all the decisions proved wise.

The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week , a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather ---all the things so unimportant that they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren't

What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It's precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said.

la adolescencia no sólo es una etapa importante de la vida, sino que es la única etapa en la que se puede hablar de vida en el verdadero sentido del término.

Para qué servían los hombres? Puede que en épocas anteriores, cuando había muchos osos, la virilidad desempeñara un papel específico e insustituible, pero hacía siglos que los hombres, evidentemente, ya no servían para casi nada.

The given - forgive me - what is marketable, is only given - forgive me - is only sold in and through language. [...] Triumphant, the word redeems anything that could lend taste or aroma and transubstantiates it into something seen and read and heard, the channels that are peculiar to it. This - what you eat and drink - is the body and blood of the word. Here - where you buy it - lies the grave of bread and wine, body and blood, dead and resuscitated as messages.

The memory brought back the timbre of her voice and the tickle of her hair on my chin as I put her to bed that night and the feeling of belonging to someone, mattering to someone, having someone whose first smile in the morning was for you. Someone who slipped their hand into yours when they were scared and trusted you to make them feel better. Someone who knew you, the important things about you, and loved you anyway.

For the most part, contemporary sorjuanistas downplay the role of religious faith and vocation in her life. This understanding of Sor Juana is flawed, I contend, for it is based on a very narrow definition of religious vocation. Too often, the diminishment of Sor Juana's vocation leads to downplaying the significance of Sor Juana's theological and philosophical writing.

Life isn't just about major characters and the big events. It's about everyone, everything, in between.

But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.

Su cuerpo... su cuerpo... sí, su cuerpo es magnífico, espléndido, divino; pero es que su cuerpo es alma, alma pura, todo él vida, todo él significación, todo él idea!

Act always as if the future of the Universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.

To say that the theory of relativity was created by Einstein is like saying that it is the spark that is responsible for the fire. The spark is necessary, but without air and tinder there would be no flame.