Meaning Quotes

If sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there’s no sense telling the story.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To my own demise, I rarely ask why I’m hungry because I’m focusing all of my energies on getting fed. And if I persist in such a diminishing cycle, in all probability I will eventually starve to death because I have chosen to gorge myself on the very things that will keep me empty.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The reason my life has wandered to nowhere is likely due to the fact that the focus of the moment has dictated the destination of my life, when the destination of my life should have been dictating the focus of the moment.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

At its best, this is my calling. At its worst, it is a mad compulsion that I just can’t shake.

~ Zoe Klein

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment ... all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The layman need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.

~ A.w. Tozer

Purpose declares that the trajectory of my existence and the course of human history were intentionally set to collide at this precise moment in time because what I have to offer human history is desperately needed at this precise time.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

We live our days in the microscopic, but something within us calls us to dream in the cosmic – every one of us. And within us exists those two worlds: the world as it is and the world as we think it ought to be.

~ A.j. Darkholme

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

~ Orson Welles

Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

~ Arundhati Roy

Obsessions are the only things that matter.

~ Patricia Highsmith

Tut, tut, child! said the Duchess. Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

~ Lewis Carroll

I think of you as a friend. I used to think friend was just another word... Nothing more, nothing less. But when I met you, I realized what was important was the word's meaning.

~ Masashi Kishimoto

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.

~ Suzanne Collins

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

~ Ernest Becker

Not everything that can be counted counts.Not everything that counts can be counted.

~ William Bruce Cameron

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

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

~ Alan W. Watts

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

~ Atul Gawande

Why should I even bother? What's the point, really?He thought for a moment. Who says there has to be a point? he asked. Or a reason. Maybe it's just something you have to do.

~ Sarah Dessen

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

~ Charlotte Brontë

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

~ Jackie Robinson

It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.

~ Wendy Mass

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?

~ Jesse Andrews

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

~ Rebecca Solnit

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.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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.

~ Donald Miller

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

~ Milan Kundera

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

~ Salman Rushdie

If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?

~ Douglas Adams

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

~ Max Barry

So that's it. I've told you everything I know. Think clearly and think for yourself. Learn to use language to express those thoughts. Love somebody with all your heart. And with everyone, whether you love them or not, find out if you can be helpful. But really, it's even simpler than that. After all this time, and all these talks in public and in private, I think I get it now. If I were taking my friend Arnold's suggestion and spoke from my deathbed, I think I know what I'd say. I see now that I had my meaning all along, I just had to notice it. The meaning of life... is life. Not noticing life is what's meaningless, even down to the last second.

~ Alan Alda

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

~ Julian Barnes

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

~ Albert Camus

Life was a revolving mystery, sometimes terrifying, sometimes maddening. But always provocative. Interesting. And although its meaning seemed beyond my grasp, it never seemed meaningless.

~ Christina Meldrum

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

~ Voltaire

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

~ Umberto Eco