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Meaning Quotes

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Meaning Quotes

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

LoveLossSolitudeLivingMeaningYearning
Book:The Painted Drum
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“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.”

WisdomMadnessMental HealthMental IllnessMeaningConformitySanityPsychiatryStigmaMental DisorderDevianceBiological Reductiveness
Book:The Meaning of Madness
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“I’ve been able to cultivate in myself a vast interior world, with an ocean deep and blue, with calm waters and stormy waves; with the scorching sun at the surface and darkly salted, cold depths, far away from the sounds of the wold. I fill it at times with glaciers and at others with sunrises. I, too, have made a forest deep and filled with life. It is full of sounds that permeate the night, morning dew, and deep, foggy darkness. And I’ve explored the forest a thousand times, and a thousand times they’ve explored me too. There lies the depth of my being—the depth of my story. It is beyond the emptiness of words. I’ve found depth in that which is shallow, and I’ve made it my home.”

HomeNatureDepthWordsMeaningEmptinessShallowMeaninglessness
Book:The Golden Sun
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“They can award me with the greatest accolades and reward me with the finest diamonds. They can name days and streets after me, canonise and celebrate me. They can make me the queen of their kingdom, the president of their nation. They can carry my picture in their wallets and whisper my name in their prayers but, tell me, what is all this worth if your voice isn’t the one calling me home?”

LoveCountryHomePresidentVoicePrayerLove QuotesStreetsCelebrateMeaningBelovedPrizeMeaninglessPrincessDiamondKingdomWorthLoverWorthlessKamandKojouriKamand KojouriIn LoveLove PoemsQueenDaysNameStateRewardAwarePictureSainthoodWhisperWalletAccoladeCanonise
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“I try to tell them that all words are plastic. Word images begin to distort in the instant of utterance. Ideas imbedded in a language require that particular language for expression. This is the very essence of the meaning within the word exotic. See how it begins to distort? Translation squirms in the presence of the exotic. The Galach which I speak here imposes itself. It is an outside frame of reference, a particular system. Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change.”

LanguageChangeMeaningConservatismTranslationSystems
Book:God Emperor of Dune
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“And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to.”

StoriesChangeMeaningUnfinishedNarrativesDigressionsUnfinished StoriesUnmeaningness
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“Sometimes religion fails to serve its meaning-making function at moments of catastrophic disruption or cultural change. For example, many elite and middle class Christian adherents were shaken by a Victorian spiritual crisis as intellectual challenges converged. Between 1840 and 1900 some lost faith in the face of Darwinian biology and the new geology, which challenged biblical claims about the origin and age of the universe; the new historical and literary study of the Bible, called Higher Criticism, which challenged the claim that scripture was divinely inspired; and the new comparative study of religions, which challenged the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity. Those doubters now looked out on a different ocean, as does the narrator in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," who once found comfort as waves in "the sea of faith" drew near, but who now hears only "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

ReligionChangeMeaning
Book:Religion: A Very Short Introduction
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“...will those who seek power and resist change destroy our country before we get to make it better?... Will our entire world as we know it be destroyed before we get to make it better? Is there even a path to better...? The chaos may bring clarity, may breed heros and artists and empathy, but it also destroys. I think we are each trying to find how best to resist the despair that such evil breeds and relies upon, and find a way forward that finds (or makes) meaning, value, some kind of order. What else can we do?”

OrderChangeEmpathyValueClarityMeaningHeroesArtistsBettermentExtended Chaos
Author:Shellen Lubin
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“As I see the bad religion situation, the answer isn't a matter of stepping out and starting new traditions so much as it's a matter of approaching the currents we're already in from a different angle, one person, one relationship at a time. And even putting it this way brings to mind the poet-pastor Eugene Peterson, who once observed that the besetting sin of the American people is probably impatience. This sounds so right to me, especially when I consider the possibility that there's hardly a sin I can think of that isn't somehow born of misperceived need, of haste and its accompanying inattentiveness, of some feverish variation once more of Hurry up and matter! Being true - ringing true - will have to involve a slow work of recognition and resistance to that mad and nervy, deluding spirit. To begin to be true is to try to choose - or risk choosing - presence over progress, really showing up and taking the time to wonder what we're really up to, what we're doing and why.”

ReligionSinGraceRelationshipMeaningPresenceImpatience
Book:Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious
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“6.4 All propositions are of equal value. 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. 6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. 6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. 6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. 6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.”

ValueMeaningPropositions
Book:Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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“He decided to spend his time dancing around the block. In this sequence of joy, every material object to him had the same value. He’d walk around knocking things over because they didn’t matter. They were just things. His outlook and the universe were always bigger. There was no stopping a person who minimized what ought to be minimized. Charlie couldn’t be fooled by constructs. There was something precious about the hands that held a glass ornament the same way they held a boulder. Something rare and admirable in its innocence and fearlessness.”

Growing UpAdventureImportanceValueInnocenceMeaningThe Goodbye SongNavigationLighthearted
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It's true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, *What a pity, what a waste.* But the waste was my own, the waste was that I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.”

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Book:Transcendent Kingdom
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