Meaning Quotes

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.

~ Preeti Bhonsle

You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.

~ Joseph Campbell

One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old... and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening.

~ Hermann Hesse

As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

We love to learn because learning feels good. It both satisfies and stimulates curiosity. Reading a good book, having a meaningful conversation, listening to great music—just doing these things make us happy. They have no extrinsic purpose. To give them one takes away from their joy.

~ Zander Sherman

Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day. C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit.

~ Gündüz Vassaf

When did the world begin and how?I asked a lamb, a goat, a cow:What's it all about and why?I asked a hog as he went by:Where will the whole thing end, and when?I asked a duck, a goose, a hen:And I copied all the answers too,A quack, a honk, an oink, a moo.

~ Robert Clairmont

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.

~ John Logan

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.

~ Iain M. Banks

A unique human trait is that we try to find meaning in the things that happen to us.

~ Jason Haxton

Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her, it was so different that it was not even the same event.

~ Orson Scott Card

Uh, I really didn't mean to disturb you.''I sincerely hope that is untrue. If you arrived here with no objective capable of disturbing me then you arrived with no objective at all, and you will have succeeded in disturbing me without purpose.

~ Jonathan Renshaw

And our desire to knowEach other and desertEach other for newCenters of meaning so thatThe boundaries may reignAnd in doing so be undone.

~ Rob Schlegel

Look at your life like a blank canvas and you're the artist, now go ahead and paint your masterpiece. Ray Mancini.

~ Ray Mancini

All the higher values in life get redefined on a regular basis for good, there is no static meaning as such.

~ Harshit Walia

To reread a book is to read a different book. The reader is different. The meaning is different.

~ Johnny Rich

Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal ... because in striving for your goal there are many things you do not see, which are directly in front of your eyes.

~ Hermann Hesse

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

~ Neel Burton

I am who I am.A coincidence no less unthinkablethan any other.I could have had differentancestors, after all.I could have flutteredfrom another nestor crawled bescaledfrom under another tree.Nature's wardrobeholds a fair supply of costumes:spider, seagull, field mouse.Each fits perfectly right offand is dutifully worninto shreds.

~ Wisława Szymborska

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality, all else being the play of thought. But it might as well be our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.

~ Irvin D. Yalom

When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.

~ Federico Fellini

Protecting your treasure means to give your life for it.

~ J.r. Rim

In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.

~ Boris Pasternak

Babynology.com explores baby names of all origins, you can get plenty of baby names along with meaning and origin. You can even search the meanings of your baby names.

~ Baby Nology

We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.

~ Mark Epstein

(Dune's Frank) Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change.

~ Joseph Bottum

A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.

~ Jules Cashford

Time is measured in meaning

~ Rene Denfeld

. . . for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.

~ Robert Penn Warren

To be young and to experience the feeling of being alive is a sweet feeling. To feel alive and to have a purpose and a goal to that life is better still.

~ James Rozoff

Often in life those seemingly ordinary moments hold the most extraordinary meaning.

~ Ken Poirot

Practice appreciation for who you are and what you have… and allow your life to unfold in the most amazing way.

~ Millen Livis

Some words were made up without any thought given. Nice is one of them. Nice has no meaning. Nice gets thrown out there to replace something meaningful. Take Goodreads and turn it into Nicereads. This goes to show that nice provides no justice.

~ J.r. Rim

In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

~ Dean Koontz

When people view their lives as insignificant, they escape using pleasure.

~ Moxie Will

Nothing is more futile than looking for meaning in things that have none.

~ Marty Rubin

Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.

~ Andrea Seigel

What does it mean to be me? I don't know. Maybe that's just it. Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe all I am is emptiness, is nothing.

~ Katherine Ewell

We must strive to become more daily. We must honestly assess our weaknesses and overcome them. We must work toward the highest possible version of ourselves. This is a worthy use of our time, but it is only when we do so with the ultimate aim of service to our fellow man that we really connect with something greater than ourselves. To contribute to the world in a positive way, this is the gift of life.

~ Chris Matakas

The beautiful truth about service is that we are afforded countless opportunities to be its vehicle. Every interaction with another is an opportunity to serve. From simply letting someone into your lane in traffic, to holding a door, to a kind smile. This is all service. I am humbled by this simple truth. We are given the opportunity to express the most meaningful use of our lives every time we interact with another sentient being.

~ Chris Matakas