Quotes About Significance

It is important that you say what you mean to say. Time is too short. You must speak words that matter.

Every action leaves its wake. Even the slightest of people makes a whisper within the world, if only you pause to listen for a soft breath on your cheek.

What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more. I have learned much. I have become wise. But have I made a difference? I cannot tell.

He thought later how peculiar it was that here was probably the biggest thing in his life, and he had shrugged it off as nothing.

Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize. Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove . . . . but the world maybe different because I was important in the life of a child.

We put our faith in things great and small. We assign to them meaning they may actually have, or meaning that we need for them to have in order to carry on.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later...

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. "This is very important to you, this box." "It's important to the world." Ishmael said: "The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die." He shrugged. He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.

Philip stepped forward to whip the king. He was glad he had lived to see this. After today, he thought, the world will never be quite the same.

And like: "Why should one want to wake up dead anyway?" If the glorious birth-to-death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have . . . if our grand and exhilarating Fight of Life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway, compared to the eons of rounds before and after—then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it?

but mostly, I guess, I want to really mean something to somebody

Hence, in shorthand, the meaning of a statement is the injunction of its enactment. No injunction, no enactment, no meaning. That is, mere metaphysics.

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

Power resides only where men believe it resides. [...] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.

Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.

Representation, then, is not - nor can it be - neutral; it is an act - indeed the founding act - of power in our culture.

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

I love whom I love," Prince Lir repeated firmly. "You have no power over anything that matters.

The power of narrative sort of defines something forever and ever.

From antiquity, people have recognized the connection between naming and power.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.