Meaning Quotes

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

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

~ Richard Feynman

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

~ Anna Quindlen

Not only does my world revolve around her, but she is my world. She's not just my reason for breathing, she's air itself. She's the meaning behind every one of my thoughts, every thrum of my pulse, every whisper of my conscience. She's my entire everything. It's as simple and as complex as that.

~ Laurelin Paige

But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.

~ Elizabeth Hand

When I told the rainbow what its colors meant, it laughed.

~ Marty Rubin

You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.

~ Kathryn Davis

if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

~ Reif Larsen

MDMA, it was beginning to be apparent, could be all things to all people.

~ Alexander Shulgin

when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.

~ Voltaire

I take a picture, but it's not about who is in the picture or the background of it. It's about the memories and meanings it holds.

~ Kayla Davis

What does this beauty or than music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?' In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.

~ Helen Keller

The significance of life is living.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

~ Roberto Bolaño

Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.

~ Terry Pratchett

The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.

~ Mary Balogh

We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.

~ Kij Johnson

Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.

~ José Saramago

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.

~ Tobias Wolff

Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.

~ Robert Coles

When the meaning is unclear there is no meaning.

~ Marty Rubin

[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.

~ Samuel Beckett

I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Find what is meaningful to you and stand by it. Even if you begin to wonder if there is any meaning to anything, continue to be yourself.

~ Jay Woodman

What's in a name?

~ William Shakespeare

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

~ Richard Powers

Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.

~ Fernán Caballero

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.

~ Paulo Coelho

Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough, both sufficient and necessary. In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context. But, here, now, I could rub her hand and she would sigh. She was a difference. Perhaps each person was the only difference in all these halls of unchanging ranks of books, kiosks, clocks, and carpet, and that, and that, at least, we had to hold to.

~ Steven L. Peck

Your muse ain't singin' on your MTV? Can't even see him on your HD TV?

~ David Mutti Clark

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

~ William Kittredge

Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.

~ John Connolly

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.

~ Loren Eiseley

Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor whatshould possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization.

~ Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.

~ Roland Barthes

Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, I did see a few Indians on the way over here. And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren't any there.' I don't remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?

~ Haruki Murakami