Quotes About Significance

Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God.

To many, "The Bible is a form of verbal wallpaper, pleasant enough in the background, but he stop thinking about it after you have lived in the house for a few weeks.

Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

Right through Israel's history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Forgiveness doesn't mean "I didn't really mind" or "it didn't really matter.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.5 Of course, if you have to choose between beautiful slavery and an ugly Exodus, you must go for the Exodus, but, as William Temple said in a different (though related) context, fortunately we don't have to make that choice.

you are rich in the things I do not need and poor in things I count important.

An hour of your life is worth more than a thousand people to me.

A life is not a waste of time

And he realized... that fragile, mortal life wasn't just important to him. It was more important than his own.

He hooked the charm into place. "Only this star matters." His thumb brushing over her inner wrist. "Should it be erased, no other has the right to live.

What is it like to be mortal?" Startled, she took a second to think, to consider. "Life is much more immediate. When you have a time limit, every moment gains an importance that an immortal will never know.

Though we may have been psychically bonded, to see my ring on my wife's finger, it meant something. To wear hers on mine, it meant even more.

With time, material things—once we let go—have a way of not having the significance we've pinned to them.

She loved him because he was the reason why.

We were what seemed important then, not some label.

The capacity to dream beyond the facts of existence into their significance enables us to remember a true past, one that simultaneously reflects and illuminates experience.

He was just a sixteen-year old boy who had been killed, a kid whose photo had been in the paper, a kid who would mostly be forgotten by the time the newspaper went into the garbage-yet he was the universe, all the dying, all the crying. He was everyone who had ever died young.

what was her life about? Did she mean nothing?

Today valueless Clues are meant for future use.

They all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them-- this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man.

Lomborg and his followers make the philosophical error of thinking that things that can't be counted don't count.

What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history--all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over--if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.