Quotessence
Home / Topics / Meaning Quotes

Meaning Quotes

Browse 1351 quotes about Meaning.

Meaning Quotes

“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

LifeRunningMeaning
Book:What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Create image

“Together we create the world we inhabit. Yet if any one of us tried to imagine a world we'd like to live in, who would come up with on exactly like the one that currently exists? We can all imagine a better world. Why can't we just create one? Why does it seem so inconceivable to just stop making capitalism? Of government? Or at the very least bad service providers and annoying bureaucratic red tape?”

PhilosophyGovernmentPoliticsMeaningMarxismCapital
Book:Bullshit jobs
Create image

“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.”

LanguageConsciousnessCommunicationFailureMeaningUnconsciousDiscoursePsychoanalysisLacanFreudian SlipsParapraxis
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
Create image

“Fortune-teller tea. Give it a sip!" The liquid was pink and smelled of strawberries, but when Maddie drank it, the flavor was deep and a little bitter, followed by a sudden burst of sweetness. Her father returned. "Well?" he asked. "It started out as black licorice and then melted into butterscotch," she said. "Oh, my girl, the tea is telling you that this is the year to keep your ear to the ground and listen for surprises. Change is coming!" Maddie's stomach was full of thoughts and her head full of butterflies. She checked her watch again. She couldn't wait for it all to begin.”

ChangeTeaMeaningFlavorsFather And DaughterMad HatterMadeline Hatter
Book:Once Upon a Time: A Story Collection
Create image

“I have loved without proof. I have trusted without guarantees. I have grieved without explanation. And I have found meaning in all of it.”

LoveHopeGriefTrustMeaningLife Journey
Book:In the Quiet - On Logic, Spirit, and the Discipline of Living Without Certainty: Agnosticism, Deism, Stoicism and the Spiritual Discipline
Create image

“The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.”

StoriesTragedySelf AwarenessMeaningMythsCatharsis
Book:The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales
Create image

“There is nothing beyond the Absolute. There can be no purpose, meaning, or hope if there is nothing beyond it. Purpose, meaning, and hope can only exist in relativity. Without relativity, these terms or states have no meaning. Relationships create purpose, meaning, and hope. Whenever or wherever there is a relationship, it means there is something beyond, something more significant to hope for, something to pursue and build meaning and hope through that pursuit.”

GodPurposeHopeMeaningDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindPhilosophy Of Dejan Stojanovic
Book:ABSOLUTE
Create image

“In today’s noisy marketplace, we need business storytelling more than ever to differentiate brands, products, and services. Too often, companies rely on description alone when marketing something. There’s a tendency to think that describing something is selling something. But it’s not. Description doesn’t create meaning. It creates information. Stories create meaning.”

MeaningMarketing QuotesBusiness Storytelling
Book:Win With Decency: How to Use Your Better Angels for Better Business
Create image

“In a hundred years no one you know will be alive. What will it matter if we fight or just spend our days sleeping in the sun?" Zhenjin blinked at him, unable to understand his father's strange mood. "If it doesn't matter, then why are we going to fight your brother?" "Perhaps I haven't said it well. I mean it doesn't matter if we change the world. The world moves on and new lives come and go. Genghis himself said he would be forgotten and, believe me, he left a long shadow. It does matter how we live, Zhenjin! It matters that we use what we are given, for just our brief time in the sun." He smiled to see his son struggling with the idea. "It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I didn't waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.”

CallingMeaningNihilismGenghis Khan
Book:Conqueror
Create image

“Your life will always be the perfect classroom journey for you and every experience that shows up in your journey is here to serve you. There is meaning and purpose behind everything that happens. There are no accidents which means your suffering through difficulties is never for nothing. Your life matters and everything you experience matters. Your trials are there to help you become a better person and trusting this is truth will take some of the sting out of them. Suffering becomes more bearable if it at least counts for something.”

SufferingMeaningPurpose Of LifeBetter PersonTrusting GodTrust Life
Book:Choosing Clarity: The Path to Fearlessness
Create image

“Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible. Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity. Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.”

LoveJusticeCrimeMoralityIntentionRevengeMeaningMotiveHypocrisyInjuryDogmaLovingVaguePersecutionEnemiesAmerican RevolutionProverbFrench RevolutionMaximPreachFeigned MoralityLove Thy EnemyPremius
Book:The age of reason
Create image

“The way that we hygger and offer reassurance is unique to each of us according to the things to which we attach most meaning. Some of us nourish others by cooking. Some offer comfort in conversation or good-natured humour. Others are adept at creating an easy ambience through which hygge flows.”

HumourComfortUniqueMeaningCreateHyggeAmbienceNourishAttachReassure
Book:The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well
Create image

“I sometimes tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen. And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects, and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he died, that the small elephant was a gift from a friend on a day of heartbreak. We start talking about those objects and soon it feels like our whole life is full of small stories to be grateful for. So many small things we pass all the time without holding them up to the light.”

LoveWritingPoetryTeachingObjectsGratitudeMeaningTeaching WritingClose Looking
Author:Ada Limon
Create image