Meaning Quotes

Hippasus’ proof—or at least Nico’s retelling of it—was really so simple that when he finished sketching it out, I wasn’t even aware that we had actually proven anything. Nico paused for a few minutes to let us mull it over.It was Peter who broke the silence, “I’m not sure I understand what we have done.”Nico seemed to be expecting such a response. “Step back and examine the proof; in fact, you should try and do this with every proof you see or have to work out for yourself. ...He again waited for his words to sink in, and it began to make sense for me. All my mathematics teachers (other than Bauji and Nico) always seemed to evade this part of their responsibility. They had been content to merely write out a proof on the blackboard and carry on, seemingly without concern for what the proof meant and what it told us.“But you should not stop here. Even when you have understood a proof, and I hope you have indeed understood this proof, ask yourself the next question, the obvious one, but as critical: So what? Or, why are we proving this? What is the point? What is the context? How does it relate to us? To answer these questions we have to step back a little. Let me show you—it’s really quite delightful.” Now there was excitement in Nico’s voice.

~ Gaurav Suri

What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning.

~ Raymond Radiguet

Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?

~ Elizabeth Buchan

Meaning beginns in the words, in the action, continues in your head and ends nowhere. There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impartient — and meaningless.

~ Pfister

Time is rarely the limiting factor -- more so, structure often is.

~ Andy Harglesis

Too many seek the “good” life, whereas only a life of meaning will satisfy the existential ache within our breasts that begs the question of why we are here, what we are to do with this life, and according to what principles we are to live. This is a question best answered at the beginning, not at the end, of our lives, for the answer will determine not only the direction of our lives but also whether we will die in comfort and peace or in hopelessness and despair.

~ James Castleton

There is not a “true” happiness and a “false” happiness. Only happiness and meaning. The key to happiness is to realize that it is not the same thing as meaning.  The key to meaning is to realize that it is to be found neither in the pursuit, nor in the denial, of happiness. Happiness speaks to our health, meaning to our hope. The former provides for the necessities of life, the latter a reason for living… Happiness is the consequence of properly loving ourselves. Meaning is the consequence of loving others as ourselves.

~ James Castleton

The journey to faith begins in a yearning for meaning and ends in love. Love is born out of the gratitude of a heart broken over its own sin and mended by grace. I would wish for a heart so broken that my gratitude, and therefore my love, would know no limits.

~ James Castleton

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.

~ Bert H. Hodges

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

~ Paul Bowles

No action is safe from meaning.

~ Karan Mahajan

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

~ Adrienne Rich

Thank you.” I’ve said thank you thousands of times in my life. Most of the time I mean it to some degree. There are times when I’ve said it and felt the gratitude behind the words wholeheartedly, but I don’t think I ever understood what those two words truly meant until this very moment. Now I think I need a new phrase because thank you is insufficient in this situation.

~ Kim Holden

They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?

~ Jean Thompson

I think is sad, how easily we throw around the word without actually understanding the sacrifice behind its meaning. Love in its definition isn't about a strong feeling towards someone, but action.

~ Rachel Van Dyken

Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

~ Milan Kundera

Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.

~ Paul Kalanithi

Does this means something!?- Does it mean that you are again on the same opinion... no reason to ask you... no reason to say it again... it's logical.

~ Deyth Banger

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.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Meaning can be found in action.

~ Andy Harglesis

Definition is a choice.

~ Andy Harglesis

Let us not be judged by actions, but by means.

~ Andy Harglesis

It is as if the Caru'ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed.

~ Ken Liu

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

~ Frank Herbert

Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass screaming past an infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper the more literary you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail.

~ Ray Bradbury

I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things…My nature is designed entirely for brief habits…I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it…But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To fully appreciate the depth of love, we must captivate ourselves in the moment. Whether it is fate or humanism, it produces a great capacity for happiness with a throw in of anxiety, grief, and isolation. Use those whales as an insidious beginning to produce meaning and humility in your life.

~ Luis Enrique Cavazos

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

~ T.s. Eliot

A picture is a personal diary where only the artist knows the meaning.

~ Steeven Shaw

... And that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something — or tries to. People need things like that to go on living — mental landscapes that have meaning for then, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That what I think.

~ Haruki Murakami

Life only remains complex with the individual perspective. Individual perspective cannot think beyond itself while life has to consider the perspective of each and every individual.

~ Roshan Sharma

Things mean pretty much what we want them to mean.

~ Ian M. Banks

The question of purpose and meaning becomes obsolete when you think beyond human life.

~ Vatsal Surti

But he thought that if the world was layered with meaning, then she was the evidence, right here.

~ Lauren Myracle

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

~ Paul Kalanithi

What is most lacking in the modern world of duplications and facsimiles, of endless information and intentional misinformation, is the authenticity that makes life truly meaningful and spiritually rewarding.

~ Michael Meade

When you strip away all the layers one by one, not much remains to “discover.” You will never find real meaning among your selfish interests, feelings, and aspirations. The answers do not lie within you.

~ James C. Dobson

Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Life is Like a Book, You cant Just read the Back, you Have to Dive in and Experience The Story within

~ Look Im A Cat

Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.

~ Cormac Mccarthy