Meaning Quotes

This rock has seen billions of years of living organisms and will see many more once we die and turn to dirt. Our life is but one tiny, brief, insignificant piece of this vast universe. So, why, the nihilist argues, do people really think that it is important to be a “good person”, get good grades, or get a good job? What difference could that possibly make to anything?Nihilism is an honest evaluation of what a universe without God would look like. Nietzsche was right about that. Where he went wrong was in thinking this was true of the actual universe.

I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what's behind thought?

I have spent so many nights out under the starsEuphoria running through my veins and alcohol coursing through my bloodMy mind would race along with my heartMy vision drawn to the stars and all the possibilities of what is out thereSuddenly the world and all its problems seems so infinitesimal My mind leaves this plane And a smile is drawn across my faceI know this isn’t reality, but I absorb it with all my beingI find it better to be lost out here then found in my real lifeAmongst the stars now I can live And it’s beautiful For the moments it lasts, it’s beautifulIts heaven on earth

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

Life has the meaning we give it, no more, no less.

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere between Mrs.Wheeler's class and Mondawmin Mall, somewhere between the schools and the streets. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafés seeing young poets flip though 'The Waste Land,' or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, had not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster.

When people don't understand the meaning of freedom in their lives, they will continue to live as if they're still oppressed.

If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer [to the problem of human existence], the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of man, and hence is more conducive to the unfolding of his powers and to his happiness than the other. All cultures provide for a patterned system in which certain solutions are predominant, hence certain strivings and satisfactions.... The deviate from the cultural pattern is just as much in search of an answer as his more well-adjusted brother. His answer may be better or worse than the one given by his culture - it is always another answer to the same fundamental question raised by human existence. In this sense all cultures are religious and every neurosis is a private form of religion, provided we mean by religion an attempt to answer the problem of human existence.

I find my greatest Power when I am Kind.

We can stage our own act on the planet-build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils-but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds. We can only witness them-whoever they are. If we were not here, they would be songbirds falling in the forest. If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them. The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.

The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning. - Albert Einstein, letter of February 5, 1921

Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.

Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.

Apology is not about saying I'm sorry, but it is about the meaning you put behind the apology and admitting that you are the wrong part.

When you can live forever what do you live for?

How many infinite lives have been lived since man first had consciousness or awareness of his soul?And how many of those souls have stared up at the stars in wonder; pondered the meaning of their existence, the meaning of life, the thoughts of their ancestors, dreamed of the futures of his offspring and the purpose of all that is man?How long will we wander before the truth is found?

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

A mothers Love is as deep and powerful as any ocean, in the depths of it forgiveness forever is found for her wandering child.

The significance of a revolution will be known after the days have gone past us. When the children of the coming years wake up and like the albatross glide across the azure sky.The freedom to live a life of meaning and joy.

Science provides us with the methods we need to discover the truth. However it is only by developing wisdom through spirituality that provides the force we need to generate meaning in our lives.

If there is no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know.

Enjoy the stillness, sweet snail! Savor the spring breeze while it still means something! Soon enough, like summer tempests your tears will come!

To drown in treacle is just as unpleasant as to drown in mud.People today are in danger of drowning in information; but because they have been taught information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.The lightning said to the oak tree: 'Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!

The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.

Because I did not understand the difference between meaning and happiness, I did not appreciate that life could be meaningful without being happy. I didn’t understand that meaning and happiness are occasionally opposed, such that the self-sacrifice that yields meaning may come at the cost of the very things on which happiness most depends. I erroneously assumed that if I were unhappy then my life lacked significance.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew

The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?

...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

In modern society the term "no" have changed meaning. It now seems to be an abbreviation for "Negotiations Open".

Leaving the familiar for unknown terrain is like a death - and feeling this level of finality should snap one back to life for life has greater meaning in the face of death.

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life?

Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does.

I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!

Even so, I’m somebody.I’m the Discoverer of Nature.I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.I bring a new Universe to the UniverseBecause I bring the Universe to itself.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret.

It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth, and as the word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and have anathematized each other about the supposable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing, another that it meant directly the contrary, and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible.It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not.

But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.

Poetry doesn’t pay. But I need it. And so do you.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

To ask, 'How do you do it?' is already starting off on the wrong foot. When reaching for the stars, there does not have to be a 'how' if there is a big enough 'why'.

A flame that flickered,And a soul that whimpered,A candle that blazed,And a fragrance that raised. The flames were fed the same,But one remained diminished,While the other touched vintage!

Happiness is the sense that my life is good because my biological needs are being met. Meaning is the sense that my life is significant because it has met the needs of another. Happiness bestows the feeling that I am whole. Meaning bestows the feeling that I matter and am valued. Happiness is an event, and meaning is a state. Happiness is the means to an end; meaning is an end in itself. Happiness fades; meaning accumulates.

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how

One may suffer the long-term in order to grow in appreciation for the small things. For in short-term suffering, one only notices the large.

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

There should be a purpose and meaning given to life.

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.