Best 1210 quotes in «meaning quotes» category

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

Phonocentrism places higher value on spoken language as being more primary than and thus superior to written language, which it conceives as necessarily corrupting the original Subject—the center of meaning.

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…

Pixelated images Dance across the carpet, Perhaps today Will wish the world anew...

Poetry doesn’t pay. But I need it. And so do you.

Porque la experiencia es eso: una triste riqueza que solo sirve para saber cómo se debería haber vivido, pero no para vivir nuevamente.

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

Practices are cultural: they do not submit to the meanings that an individual wants them to have, either for herself or for others.

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.

Pride and shame are two sides of the same coin, a coin which is only issued by "The Bank of Fear",  a coin to be used in the singular purpose of purchasing chains that would imprison one’s Soul and delay inevitable perfection.

Protecting your treasure means to give your life for it.

Purpose drives the process by which we become what we are capable of being.

Purpose is the vision for your existence.

Putting it into words will destroy any meaning.

Qualcosa che ci sfugge deve pur restare... Perche' il potere abbia un oggetto su cui esercitarsi, uno spazio in cui allungare le sue braccia... Finche' so che al mondo c'e' qualcuno che fa dei giochi di prestigio solo per amore del gioco, finche' so che c'e' una donna che ama la lettura per la lettura, posso convincermi che il mondo continua... E ogni sera m'abbandono alla lettura, come quella lontana lettrice sconosciuta.

Questions of meaning are a function of human life, but they are not native to the universe itself—meaning is not what we find, but what we create with the lives we live and the seeds we plant and the organizing principles according to which we sculpt our personhood.

Qui n'a plus qu'un moment a vivre N'a plus rien a dissimuler

Reading is accumulating knowledge. But not only that. Reading offers us every day what religion promises us for a posthumous and improbable future: the possibility of living beyond what our lifetime allows us to.

Really good writing has purpose and that purpose should be to shape other minds to desire truth and a more noble purpose in life and to become more thoughtful and knowledgable about important things like being kind and loving towards all living beings on our planet and not just humans but all animals.

Receiver: Speech discriminates between listening ears even if sound does not.

Remember, life is a bit tough most of the time. Also remember, if it was easy it would be boring.

Recipe for Peace: always welcome yourself with Loving and open arms to wherever you are and always be gentle with yourself for wherever you've been, knowing that at every point the experiences, knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that one has been given is the only well one has to draw from in the doing of one's best. As each of us proceeds according to the best Light we have, it is accounted as righteousness... no matter the outcome.

Reiterating other people's hopes, dreams and fears. That's what politics is all about.

Reason begets honesty, and honesty, if given its head, begets confidence; so consequently, there is a sort of grand authority in the stances of those who know why they are standing.

Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth—yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.

Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.

Satan is behind the theory of evolution. Satan hates God and us.  Satan is the father of all lies. So he wants nothing more than to make every human being alive believe lies about God, ourselves and how and why we exist.

Science is about our passionate conviction that we are placed within a universe that is not simply the result of our imaginings, and our longing and determination to understand it. Ultimately, science is about reality, truth and freedom.

Science, while of value in so far as it can be used to address and even answer logical or technical questions, cannot and thus should not be used to create new (ultimate) values or provide a final judgement on the legitimacy of values themselves. Weber argues that it is the duty of the vocational scientist to recognize this, and to avoid at all costs presenting academic prophecies in the guise of value-free science. This calls not simply for the vocation of science to be imbued with a sense of ethical responsibility, but for science itself to be a self-reflective practice, one that identifies and calls into question its own presuppositions. In this respect, Weber, like Nietzsche, argues that 'science requires superintendence and supervision', for it is to proceed within strictly defined limits, and beyond this is to remain accountable for its own presuppositions or values. And it is on this basis that science may assume an objective form, and with this become, paradoxically, a practice that is valuable, if not necessarily meaningful, in its own right... it is, in general, to serve life and not vice versa...

Seduced by the spectacular theoretical and practical successes of the objective sciences into thinking that the methods and criteria of those sciences were the only means to truth, philosophers sought to apply those same methods and criteria to questions relating to the meaning of life and the values that give meaning to life. Philosophy, especially the Analytical species prevalent in the English-speaking world, was broken up into specialized disciplines and fragmented into particular problems, all swayed and impregnated by scientism, reductionism, and relativism. All questions of meaning and value were consigned to the rubbish heap of 'metaphysical nonsense'.

Righteousness is the way of Light

Science provides us with the methods we need to discover the truth. However it is only by developing wisdom through spirituality that provides the force we need to generate meaning in our lives.

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

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.

Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

Sharing your life with someone will have much more meaning coming from a place of independence rather than co-dependence.

She'd have no purpose in a world like this one,' I explained. 'Not now. Even if we did rebuild her-and if I thought we could, if I thought that would make you both happy...' I shook my head. 'In any case, with all that being beside the point, she'd be too big for how things stand in Thremedon now. So, the only other alternative would be to make her smaller- take that same spark she had, reduce her to something tiny enough to fit in your pocket, or in the palm of your hand. And that's all wrong too, isn't it? She wouldn't be the same. What you might have thought you could do- return to a time and place when the war was still being fought, when the Corps was still trying to win- it would require a different sort of magician. I don't think there's ever been one that powerful.

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

She gasped. “You know what your problem is? You don’t take yourself… or anything… seriously enough!” She sat rigidly, her teeth and her buttocks clenched tight, nostrils flaring with each impassioned breath, tears burning the back of her eyelids. Was she really having this debate with Bruce Koczynski? A man she believed incapable of these intense opinions and complex ideas? She didn’t even know he had the vocabulary. It was utterly disorienting.

She had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.

She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring.

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.

Sheridan’s eyes fell to the watery gateway as he begrudgingly donned the novel wetsuit and pulled on the crown of arc lamps. Following Kunchen’s lead, he cinched it tightly around his waist, feet, and neck. And all the while his eyes returned to the teeming portal. Kunchen took notice. “This whirlpool is like the mighty river of life.” Kunchen said. Sheridan watched as Kunchen dipped his right hand into a shallow pool of ice-crusted water, scooping up the pristine liquid in his cupped fingers. He submitted the handful of water to Sheridan. With the gentle tilt of his right hand he poured it out, watching it trickle into his left hand. With unerring kindness in his eyes, Kunchen became the teacher and Sheridan the pupil: “Observe the water. It is soft, easily bending and transforming to its circumstance.” He poured the water from his left hand. It fell into the writhing water and disappeared in an instant. “But when it joins with the force of the whirlpool it becomes powerful and unstoppable. You must be flexible like the water, feeling the flow of life, tapping into its current. This is the only way.

She wasn't the perfect mom. However, she was the perfect Mother for me.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, to your community around you, to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason — to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?" Molly asks when Vivian reads some of these stories aloud. "It certainly helps," Vivian says.