Quotes About Significance

Amare le parole, investire una parte di sé in quello che è scritto, credere nel potere dei libri: tutto ciò sommerge il resto, e al confronto la propria vita individuale diventa insignificante.

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And

But it does matter, Archie. Everything matters.

school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you're doing but the importance of why you're doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn't have been less psychologically damaging if they'd thought of it as "gardening," I got a vicious beating that would've made Kunta Kinte wince.

In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you're doing but the importance of why you're doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn't have been less psychologically damaging if they'd thought of it as "gardening," I got a vicious beating that would've made Kunta Kinte wince.

Like most analyses, my conception of a meaningful activity is centered around significance and impact.

A meaningful life, at least to some extent, has to do with what one does and how one affects people.

Emily Esfahani Smith talks about the American Freshman Survey, which found that in the late 1960s, 86 percent of respondents claimed that "developing a meaningful life philosophy" was "essential" or "very important," while in the 2000s, the proportion dropped to 40 percent. She is disappointed in this; she sees it as a bad sign.

Smith organizes her own book, The Power of Meaning, around four themes that show up in this summary: Belonging: connecting to and bonding with other people Purpose: finding something worthwhile Storytelling: narratives that bring order to life Transcendence: mystical experiences of self-loss

It's not just me. When you ask people, "How often, if at all, do you think about the meaning and purpose of life?" or "In the bigger picture of your life, how personally significant and meaningful to you is what you are doing at the moment?," parents—both mothers and fathers—say that their lives have more meaning than those of non-parents.

You do not really understand the significance of words until you realize that the first words that human ears ever heard were not the words of another human being, but the words of God! The value of every piece of human communication is rooted in the fact that God speaks.

When we speak, it must be with the realization that God has given our words significance. He has ordained for them to be important.

We are all capable of fighting for what has little value while forgetting things of transcendent value.

the character of a life isn't set in three or four big moments of life, but in ten thousand little, virtually unnoticed moments.

God's grace invites you to be part of something that is far greater than your boldest and most expansive dream. His grace cuts a hole in your self-built prison and invites you to step into something so huge, so significant that only one word in the Bible can adequately capture it. That word is glory.

We were created to be part of something so big, so glorious, so far beyond the ordinary that it would totally change the way we approach every ordinary thing in our lives.

Our lives are like lace, appearing unbelievably complicated and mixed up to others. It is essential to remember that your life has to make meaning only to you.

non numerantur sed ponderantur (They are not counted but weighed)

The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

God did not create us to be nobodies, but to be somebodies in communion with him through participation in Jesus' glorious story.

I felt strongly that since the pursuit of good science was so difficult it was essential that the problem being studied was an important one to justify the effort expanded.

What did beauty matter, anyway?

Men delude themselves into thinking that the events in which they participate are of particular significance to history, but they rarely are. One empire is the same as another.

He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn't face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events.