Meaning Quotes - Page 6

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.

As it is?

What is the most important thing in your life?For me, it is my freedom of mind, my freedom to choose my own ways of self-construction or self-destruction.

For Hood's sake,' the foreigner muttered. 'What's wrong with words?' 'With words,' said Redmask, turning away, 'meanings change.' 'Well,' Anaster Toc said, following as Redmask made his way back to his army's camp,.. 'that is precisely the point. That's their value - their ability to adapt -' 'Grow corrupt, you mean. The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.

Make it simple, but significant.

And what's beyond vastness? It shrinks...

It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.

Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.

A place without meaning is no place to be.

There are people we meet who have but little roles to play in our lives, who happen to be no more than a special appearance to our story.People, who influence, who possess the drift, the force whose implication leads us forward in our course of life. We might have never come across them until today and probably not hear from them tomorrow or ever after, for all that exists is this moment, a moment enough for them to fulfil their purpose that being to help us find our way and enough for us to fulfil ours that being to actually find it, reach it, accomplish it. They are the ones who bring meaning to our lives, who happen to inspire, who spark a fire that we carry with us for the rest of our days, who are but pillars of hope and sometimes sacrifice, life-changers, life-savers, catalysts.

We each carry with us unique gifts, recognized and unrecognized. We long to harness those gifts in a way that gives life significance and helps us to matter more in the lives of others.

The key to living a purposeful life lies in identifying how best you can be a vehicle for God's divine love and light.

Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.

A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality.

Also at times, on the surface of streams,Water?bubbles formAnd grow and burstAnd have no meaning at allExcept that they’re water?bubblesGrowing and bursting.

Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.

God's love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it based on anything we do, and that 'anything' were to collapse, then God's love would crumble as well. But with the God of Jesus no such thing can possibly happen. People who realize this can live freely and to the full.

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful.

They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.

There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful

That I talk about that doesn't mean anything, that my name is like this doesn't mean anything... that I watch this and listen to this doesn't mean anything - Meaning of All By DeYth Banger

I sort of kind of said something a little like that but maybe not clearly enough to sound like that... But it's what I meant.

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything.... It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.

Shortly after I started hitting some notable milestones on my Spiritual journey, I went into a thrift store that benefits veterans, My eyes were quickly drawn to a dusty and tattered image of Christ laying mixed in with some other things on a shelf. I picked it up, And on it was written these words:"If you accept it...I would give you the gift of seeing yourself as I see you..."The truth and love of that image and simple words stopped me in my tracks and opened my heart. Since then I have received a wonderful gift, to know myself as an Eternal Spiritual Being, a Child of our Loving Father in Heaven....And no I didn't buy it, I received the message loud and clear, So I left it there, in hopes that the image and words would speak to someone else's Soul in the same way they had spoken to mine.

The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.

If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.

First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

Levinas describes that faith as crucial to what it means to be human: (...) "its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies being over that which assures it".

The search for meaning in our lives takes us on paths large and small. When we go beyond ourselves-whether in forgiveness, unselfishness, thoughtfulness, generosity and understanding toward others-we enter into the spiritual realm of meaning. By giving beyond ourselves, we make our own lives richer. This is a truth long understood at the heart of all meaningful spiritual traditions. It's a mystery that can only be experienced. And when we do experience it, we are in the heart of meaning. We are no longer a prisoner of our thoughts.

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.

A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.

but it's not safe and I can feel him slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. "Stay with me." As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back but I don't catch it.

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they're so empirically familiar with how atheists think.

A VIP area is nothing without not-so-important people.

Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.

The meaning of life is to make life be more.

... and I realise the only way to tell the others is through the way my voice can take these broken wordsand turn it into music. Turn it into poetry.And I sing to make myself come alive, but also for you,because I’d like this to mean something.To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day and so now I will tell.If not for you, then for my own heart, because it tells me to,and I'm learning to listen.

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.

If there is one thing the psychic taught me, it's that people and events are rarely who and what we think they are. They are more meaningful, more worth our attention-part of some finely choreographed, eternal dance that we would be wise to bow down before in gratitude and humility.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?

Search for truth, not for meaning. Meaning comes from the perspective of a person who interprets the truth.

Your life will always be the perfect classroom journey for you and every experience that shows up in your journey is here to serve you. There is meaning and purpose behind everything that happens. There are no accidents which means your suffering through difficulties is never for nothing. Your life matters and everything you experience matters. Your trials are there to help you become a better person and trusting this is truth will take some of the sting out of them. Suffering becomes more bearable if it at least counts for something.

To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?

...not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.

Development in general doesn’t make you better employee or better manager. Development makes you a better human who is able to invest the best in you to add beauty and meaning to your life and the rest of the world.

That thing over there was more there than it’s there!Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn’t exist.But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,And the rest are the dreams men have,The myopia of someone who doesn’t look very much,

The major dilemma in life arises when it is assumed that meaning is simply a greater degree of happiness, such that the more one indulges physiological needs, the more likely it is that life will be experienced as meaningful.

[Your] search for meaning in the world... can only really be fulfilled by the greater purpose that has sent [you] here in the first place.

In old days, instead of asking a teacher, people looked at the dictionary to know the complete definition of teacher. Now Google becomes our teacher and to know about Google, people Google it.

Death is the destroyer and giver of sense.

examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.

Grab tightly to the reigns of passion and ride into glory for without it life would be stagnant and you would be a spirit without cause.

...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.