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Meaning Quotes

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Meaning Quotes

“Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my cell's confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house. Who am I? They often tell me I would talk to my warden freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command. Who am I? They also tell me I would bear the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win. Am I then really all that which other men tell of, or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation, tossing in expectation of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint and ready to say farewell to it all. Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!”

LifeGodSadnessStrengthLonelinessDepressionWeaknessLongingMeaningWoebegone
Book:Prison Poems
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“We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.”

LongingMeaning
Book:Constructions
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“When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”

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Book:When Breath Becomes Air
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“Venture into the mountains and immerse yourself in their tranquil nature. Take that tranquillity with you, let it permeate your spirit, and infuse your life with a sense of meaning.”

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Book:Coming to Grips with the Mountains and Valleys of This World
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“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.”

LifeAnswersCertaintyMeaningQuestioningQuestionsSearching
Book:Between the World and Me
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“When you strip away all the layers one by one, not much remains to “discover.” You will never find real meaning among your selfish interests, feelings, and aspirations. The answers do not lie within you.”

RealFeelingsAnswersRemainsSelfishMeaningYouLayersWillLieNeverTheDiscoverOneNotFindToAspirationsAndAllWithinYourWhenAwayMuchInterestsByAmongDo NotStrip
Book:Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
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“The Absolute can only create and recreate itself if it transforms into something “less absolute.” This “less” absolute Being manifested through many beings is not only the Absolute's creation or recreation but is also its only life. In absolute Oneness, there is no real life. Division is the source of life. The secret to life is plurality. Oneness without plurality loses meaning. Plurality in Oneness is the source of meaning and purpose.”

GodPurposeUniverseMeaningDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindPlurality
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Zero is the only thing endlessness and multitude do not want to possess. Zero is the only eternity—eternal sleep, but endlessness, the Absolute, wants motion and life. Eternity is possible only beyond perpetuity. Duration implies the number, endlessness, and space. Only Zero enslaves every number, every endlessness, and space; only Zero enslaves (captures) perpetuity (duration). Only enslaved perpetuity can be an eternity, and eternity can only exist (be) in the present. Every past is measurable and reducible to a number, and so is every future; only the present has no number. The only number of the present is Zero, and Zero is the “end of life.” Therefore, there is no life in the present, although it is the only life if we think from the point of view of life.”

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Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Absolute is always the same, yet always new. Its sameness is the source of its variety. Its sameness and oneness (singularity) make it omnipotent and rejuvenating. Its infinite age makes it infinitely young. It cannot be born or die, but it can live. The ultimate exit of the Absolute is life. Its meaning is life, not absoluteness. It already possesses absoluteness, but its absoluteness is its biggest enemy if it becomes satisfied with it because it transforms it into nothingness. It must fight against its absoluteness to gain the absolute value of life, which, although relative, provides meaning and purpose.”

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Book:ABSOLUTE
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“If we are to presuppose that the universe is inherently material, that we are emergent organisms from this universe and by nature we seek and generate meaning, meaning itself becomes a substructure of the universe. To think otherwise is to dissociate ourself from the universe, which contradicts the latter belief”

PhilosophyUniversePsychologyMeaningNeuroscienceAldrich Chan
Book:Reassembling Models of Reality: Theory and Clinical Practice
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“Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why. “In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot. But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love. I will die. You will die. The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.”

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Book:Figuring
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“To understand the universe at the deepest level, we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?” “This is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. We shall attempt to answer it in this book. Unlike the answer given in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ours won’t be simply “42.”

LifeUniverseMeaningBig Questions
Book:The Grand Design
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“Given everything we know about the universe it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of Israeli, German or Russian nationalism – or indeed of nationalism in general. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth. Yet people somehow manage not to see beyond it. Indeed, billions of people throughout history have believed that for their lives to have meaning, they don’t even need to be absorbed into a nation or a great ideological movement. It is enough if they just ‘leave something behind’, thereby ensuring that their personal story continues beyond their death. The ‘something’ I leave behind is ideally my soul or my personal essence. If I am reborn in a new body after the death of my present body, then death is not the end. It is merely the space between two chapters, and the plot “that began in one chapter will carry on into the next. Many people have at least a vague faith in such a theory, even if they do not base it on any specific theology. They don’t need an elaborate dogma – they just need the reassuring feeling that their story continues beyond the horizon of death.”

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Book:21 Lessons for the 21st Century
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“We have to stop quantifying ourselves. Why as people do we identify our lives and a part of our identities as 20 something's or 30 something's. I am very much alive. I notice the heavy warm breeze, the blue of the sky, my chocolate kind of freckles that form from the warm sun...my god that sun. The warmth. I hear the sound of night. I recognize the vastness of the sky. The stars all those stars. Our lives are some kind of special. I'm done being so quick about it or so mundane about it. We are not chipmunks or squirrels in that way we can actually chew our food slowly. Taste the temperature of our drinks. Our lives are so short already. We are so small in this gigantic space sweating over small things as opposed to taking in the little things. There will always be something to do or something happening how we handle it is all the difference. We are small in such a huge colossal universe that somewhere someone bigger than us is probably laughing. Love. Eat well. Wonder. Just be...in the moment. Laugh. Spread joy. We are all works in progress. That is all xo”

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Author:Jill Telford
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“In the quantum multiverse all eventualities are possible. Which means, paradoxically, that all eventualities are inevitable. They have also quite possibly already happened. Make of that what you will, not that your will has much to do with it. Because here's the thing. If you believe that consciousness is an accumulation of memory; if you believe that you often know what's going to occur either through some animal instict or a human subscription to fate, then you are a walking and talking embodiment of everything happening all at once.”

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Author:Emma Jane Unsworth
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“Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.”

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Author:Mary Swan
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“And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes. A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.”

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Author:George R. R. Martin
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“Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.”

ExistenceSolitudeMeaningIsolationModernismSubjectivityMeaninglessnessEnnuiPostwarCollapse Of Meaning
Book:The Spider's House
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“It is certainly possible that an individual can, qua individual, suffer some failure of meaning, as in pathological boredom or depression. But any given social world is also a nexus of common significances, saliences, taboos, and a general shared orientation that can also either be sustained or can fail. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of such a social condition, shared meaningfulness, or intelligibility, is that it can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure. (His general name for the achievement and maintenance of such a form of intelligible life is “Sittlichkeit” and his case for this sort of priority of Sittlichkeit over strictly individualist accounts of mindedness in-action has not, I want to argue, been properly appreciated.)”

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Book:Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
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“Lightness and weightiness are both linked to a philosophy of life. They are choices in life. Heaviness can be the embodiment of a sense of responsibility, the expression of maturity, the result of profound meditation or the emanation of a search for meaning in life. Weightiness, however, may also lead to a feeling of oppression, when it is felt as a burden, an unbearable burden. Then time has come to let loose and things can finally lose their gravity. ( "The unbearable heaviness of being" )”

LifePhilosophyChoicesResponsibilityMeditationBurdenOppressionMeaningMaturityGravityLightnessHeavinessWeightinessLet Loose
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“We are but cells living in a much larger organism, however, this does not make our existence less significant – for an organism without cells is no organism at all. We define it; we make it what it is. We are responsible for its health, its functionality, and above all, its purpose. A lone cell can restore the others, or a lone cell can spread a plague.”

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Book:Rise of the Morningstar
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“Truth is not a thing Or a concept. It is as multidimensional In its meaning As it is in its reflection. It is both invisible And visible. It carries tons of weight, But can be carried. It is understood first through the spirit Before science, And felt in the heart, Before the mind. Truth is not always heard by reason, Because reason sometimes Ignores Truth. Always listen to your conscience. Your conscience is your heart And reason is your mind. Your mind is simply there to reason With your heart. But remember, Truth is in your heart, And only through your heart Can you connect to the light of God. He who is not motivated by his heart Will not see Truth, And he who thinks only with his mind Will be blind to Truth. He who does not think With his conscience, Does not stand by God, For the language of light Can only be decoded by the heart. He who reads and recites words of God Also does not stand by God – If he merely understands Words with his mind But not his heart. Truth is black and white, And the entire spectrum Of colors in-between. It can have many parts, But has a solid foundation. Truth lacks perfection, For it is the reflection of all, Yet its reflection as a whole, Is more beautiful Than the accumulated flaws Of the small. Truth is the only brand Worth breathing And believing. So stand for truth In everything you do, And only then Does your life have Meaning.”

MindHeartReasonTruthScienceSpiritReflectionConscienceMeaningSuzy Kassem
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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