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Meaning Quotes

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Meaning Quotes

“.. all I've ever wanted for my children was the opportunity soar, no matter their heritage, and to live a life of meaning. That has been my fight. But in our current society with our current laws, it's enough that you succeed, that you are able to follow your passion in your work, that you leave a legacy that will benefit the multitudes - one day, even the colored multitudes.”

LifeBlackMeaningSegregationColored
Author:Marie Benedict,Victoria Christopher Murray
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“Jan Hindman knows all too well that people who have lied for decades about their offending would lie to her about being victimized as a child, so she compared the reports of abuse by child molesters who were not being polygraphed on their answers with a later group who was informed that they would have to take a polygraph after the interview. The group that was being polygraphed was also given immunity from prosecution for crimes previously unknown in order to take away one of the many reasons that offenders lie.[103] The study is not about how good the polygraph is — although it appears to be highly accurate[104] and better than people are at detecting deception in any case. Rather, this study is about how good the offenders thought the polygraph was because the answers of the group who was going to take the polygraph turned out to be very different from the group who was going to take the polygraph turned out very different from the group who wasn't going. In a series of three studies, the offenders who claimed they were abused as a child were 67 percent, 65 percent, and 61 percent without the threat of a polygraph. With polygraph (and conditional immunity), the offenders who claimed they were abused as children were 29 percent, 32 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The polygraph groups reported approximately half the amount of victimization as children as the nonpolygraph groups did. Nonetheless, the notion that most offenders were victims has spread throughout the field of sexual abuse and is strangely comforting for most professionals. For one thing, it gives meaning to the behavior of offenders and at the same time allows people to feel badly for them. I remember a cartoon in which a man is lying in a gutter, badly beaten. Two social workers stand over him, and one says to the other, "The man who did this really needs help." If offenders are just victims, then no one has to face the reality of malevolence, the fact that there are people out there who prey on other for reasons we simply don't understand.”

MythMeaningReasoningAbusersRapistsChild AbusersMeaning In LifeVictim PerpetratorsMeaning To LifeMeaning Behind Karma KandPeophiles
Book:Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders
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“Man becomes uprooted, starts feeling meaningless. All the values of life disappear. A great darkness surrounds. Sense of direction is lost. One simply feels accidental. There seems to be no , no significance. Life seems to be just a byproduct of chance. It seems existence does not care for you. [...] All seems to be pointless. These times of chaos, disorder, can either be a great curse, [...] or they can prove a quantum leap in human growth. It depends on how we use them. It is only in such great times of chaos that great stars are born. [...] The ordinary masses live in such unconsciousness that they can’t see even a few steps ahead. They are blind. And they are the majority! The coming twenty-five years, the last part of this century, is going to be of IMMENSE value. If we can create a great momentum in the world for meditation, for the inward journey, for tranquillity, for stillness, for love, for God... if we can create a space in these coming twenty-five years for God to happen to many many people, humanity will have a new birth, a resurrection. A new man will be born.”

SpiritualPurposeSpiritualityMeaningLife PurposeNihilismNew Man
Book:Philosophia Perennis
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“The "layman" need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.”

PurposeWorkCallingSacredMeaningMotiveSanctifyLaymanThe Pursuit Of God
Book:The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine
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“The subjects that fascinate me are substantially varied. Sometimes I am transfixed by the emptiness of a scene, at other times by the chaos. Sometimes I am drawn to the vibrant richness of colours, at other times to the mute lack of it. But one thing is certain, in the midst of space and light, I always find meaning.”

ArtLightSpiritualitySpaceAwarenessPhotographyDiscoveryCuriosityMeaningInward Journey
Book:In Search for Meaning
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“Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.”

MeaningIrrelevantUselessness
Book:This boy's life
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“(About the reason why scholars hold inclination towards Arabic as a heresy): [...] one must not accept the customs of a people whose language one loves, nor cover up small coups d'état with the gold plate of language, nor dupe young people and Maecenases into believing that one can fence as soon as one knows how to parry and thrust and hold the épée and body.”

MeaningInfluencesPower Of Language
Book:Writings on Philosophy and Language
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“Since language was increasingly believed to be the semiotic system which could be analyzed with the most profit […] and the system which could serve as a model for all other systems […] the model of the linguistic sign gradually came to be seen as the semiotic model par excellence. // By the time this conclusion was reached ( the definitive sanction took place with Saussure), the linguistic model was crystallized into its 'flattest' form, the one encouraged by the dictionaries and, unfortunately, by a lot of formal logic which had to fill its empty symbols only for the sake of exemplification as well. As a consequence, the notion of meaning as synonymy and as essential definition began to develop.”

MeaningDictionariesSynonyms
Book:Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
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“I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem. Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It's as if all the knowledge I've soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.”

LifeTruthJoyLearningMeaning
Book:Flowers for Algernon
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“By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents whileb proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.”

LifeConsciousnessMeaningIdealismIdealisticHard Problem Of ConsciousnessBernardo KastrupKastrup
Book:Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything
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“A delicate trace of a smile appeared on Passer’s face. Jan knew that smile well. it was not a joyous or an approving smile, but a smile of tolerance. They had always been far apart in their views, and in the rare moments when their differences became too visible, they would smile that smile to assure each other that their friendship was not in danger. 295 When things are repeated, they lose a fraction of their meaning. Or more exactly, they lose, drop by drop, the vital strength that gives them their illusory meaning. 295-6 It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense. 297 Whenever her mother-in-law had wanted something from them, she would weep. Weeping was her way of blaming them, and there was nothing more aggressive than her tears. 114 I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. 109 We shall flee rest, we shall flee sleep, We shall outrun dawn and spring And we shall shape days and seasons To the measure of our dreams. 94 All mysticism is excessive. The mystic must not be afraid of ridicule if he wants to go to the limits, the limits of humility or the limits of sensual pleasure. 80”

ToleranceMeaningRepeatingFictional CharactersAggressive TearsExcessive MysticismFragility Of Purpose
Book:The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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“I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun. This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.”

ArtIndustryMeaningMachineryDetroitDiego RiveraMuralsDetroit Institute Of ArtsFrescoes
Book:My Art, My Life
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“It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.”

LoveRelationshipsExistenceDreamsMeaningExistentialismBreaking Up
Book:A Short Stay in Hell
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“. . . when we take upon ourselves his yoke of obedience, his yoke is easy, his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30). When is a burden light? It is when we find our burdensome lives caught up, elevated, borne aloft by something greater than our lives. Mission gives meaning. Jesus does not come to us to relieve us of all yokes or burdens; rather, he comes offering us a yoke worth wearing, a burden worth bearing. It is a great gift not to have to make your life mean something, to have your life given significance by the Lord whose cross, when taken up, takes us up as well. 119-120”

ChristianityMeaningCrossGospel Centred
Book:Calling & Character: Virtues Of The Ordained Life
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“He continued, “If you want to follow God, you have to turn away from whatever it is you were trusting and instead turn to Him. What do you turn to when you’re having a hard time to make you feel better and to give you relief, confidence, hope, or pleasure? Whatever you turn to, that’s the thing you worship. That’s the thing you love most. Whatever is at the core of your life, that’s the thing you are actively turning to and trusting in to give meaning to your life and help you through the hard times. That thing is your functional god. If you put drugs or money or sex in the center, your wellbeing will be dependent on those things. In essence, they will rule you.”

HopeWorshipMeaningWellbeingFollowTrustingTurn
Book:Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose
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“MARCELLUS: But look, Agathon, what strange dark light is glowing amongst the clouds. You would think a sea of flame is blazing behind the clouds. A divine fire! And the sky is like a blue bell. It's as if one can hear it tolling in deep, solemn tones. You might even suspect that up there above us, in unattainable heights, something is taking place of which we shall never know. But at times we can sense it, when that vast silence has settled over the earth. And yet! All this is very confusing. The gods have to pose insoluble riddles for us humans. And the earth does not rescue us from the cunning of the gods; for it too is full of things that confound the senses. Both things and humans confuse me. True enough! Things are very taciturn! And the human soul won't yield up its riddles. You ask and it keeps silent. AGATHON: Let's live and not ask questions. Life is full of beauty.”

KnowledgeDialogueMeaningGodsMary Magdalene
Book:Gedichte und Prosa
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