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Meaning Quotes

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Meaning Quotes

“Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.”

PainEmpathyMeaning
Book:The Faraway Nearby
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“The wide-eyed professor lectured, on the verge of tears, and when class ended, the students closed their notebooks shut and asked of her plans for the weekend, which was answered politely, but with a tinge of sadness, for the professor feared her personhood, which had in her lesson plan existed truly only minutes ago, was already being reduced to the small, meaningless matters of tomorrow.”

SocietyLonelinessIdentityMeaningUnseenThe Goodbye SongUnheardConversationsPersonhood
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. By setting aside dependent emotions and constraining compromises, we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.”

LonelinessSolitudeMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Ultimately, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition, and, unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before it resurfaces, often with a vengeance. On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional and religious structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.”

ReligionLonelinessSolitudeMythMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“The modern world has lost the sexual excitement the ancients enjoyed, but this can be restored, by recreating the world of sacred sex, through ritual, and by escaping the anti-sex attitudes of Abrahamism which still contaminate every part of society. Moreover, Jungian psychology provides the means to understand the unconscious elements that featured everywhere in ancient mythology, and through this understanding we can all reach lucid sex, unlike the ancients, who never attained any authentic understanding of the unconscious forces operating on them, and most moderns who are just as clueless about psychology and the unconscious.”

SexPsychologyMythologyMeaningAbrahamism
Book:Lucid Sex: Revolutionize Your Sex Life
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“In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having travelled slowly up with all the bloom upon its wings.”

PoetryBeautyHealthIllnessMeaningSickness
Book:On Being Ill
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“i love good cries, loud sobs that soak your pillow that kind that come at the end of a perfect book you're gasping for air as droplets of salt water trickle down your cheeks into the corners of your mouth as your chest rises and falls and your vision is blurred by the tears but your mind is so clear and your every thought in that moment feels so meaningful and important and right it feels okay to just let it all out it makes you feel like you are free”

MindBookPoetryAirCryTearsThoughtMeaningFreeSobs
Book:Eighteen Years
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“language affects the ways we experience the world, and ourselves. we usually think of language, when we think of it at all, as something transparent, or like a mirror that reflects things as they really are. the most important realisation of 20th century western philosophy was that language does not simply mirror the world, in fact, it largely determines what we notice and what we do not.”

PhilosophyLanguageKnowledgeLearningProgressIntelligenceMeaningObservant
Book:Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution
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“You cannot "educate" people; education does not improve moral character and congenital intelligence. You can show them things, and if they find meaning in them, they'll adapt to their own lifestyle and purpose. It's like eating: you take in food, break it down, and it becomes part of you where you can use it. The rest goes into the carrot patch, and might feed something else.”

EducationLearningIntelligenceMeaningGenetics
Book:Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity
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“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”

WritingDeathRelationshipSadnessTeachingLonelinessAloneMeaningWriterStoryFeelingWriteObservingStarFeelWordListenLonesomeFinishTellingSignalListener
Author:John Steinbeck
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“By cultivating the values that matter most—and pursuing them unconditionally, undeterred by circumstance—we can live meaningful lives. The path isn’t easy. It leads away from the conventional ways of the world and our instincts. It requires controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Gradually, we can close the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be. As we think, speak, and act with intention and build habits aligned with our values, we experience a transformation.”

ValuesGrowthTransformationPersonal GrowthMeaningFulfillmentUnconditional
Book:The Unconditionals: Five Timeless Values to Live Without Limits and Ignite Your Superpower
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“If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning. As Dostoevsky put it, "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." The real fear should be of the opposite course.”

GrowthAnxietyMeaningSelf Development
Book:Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life
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