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Meaning Quotes

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Meaning Quotes

“Is what we were doing really wrong? If the point of life is to find meaning and purpose, and my purpose in life was to enjoy myself, was it really wrong to live like that? Was our country not founded on the belief that every human has the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Did it violate some greater universal law if my actions to please myself harmed and caused pain to others, or should they just mind their own dang business?”

PurposeMeaningPurpose Of LifeRight And WrongRight And Wrong Quotes
Book:Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose
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“I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.”

LoveLifeDeathMeaning
Book:Boy Meets Boy
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“On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow. Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: "Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also said to be favored by fairy folk. Meanings associated with it include money, protection, sleep, prophetic dreams, and beloved daughter.”

MeaningDescriptionIrishWildflowerProphetic DreamsOlivia KavanaghFairy FolkCinquefoil
Book:The Cottingley Secret
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“It is not my job to change the minds of those who desire to harshly judge me. It’s merely my mission to love them too. This does not pose a threat. Only the jealously of my willingness to love can pose a threat. Still, we are all capable of loving each other. Love is a choice. The appearance of neutrality is merely an interpretation from the lens of one's own understanding. It’s neither truth nor fact. Merely the meaning someone has given to what they perceive.”

TruthPerspectivePrejudiceMeaningJudgementNeutralityViewViewpointWhat Is TruthLens Of Perspective
Author:Julieanne O'Connor
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“I don’t want people’s beliefs and opinions about God. I want true knowledge of the true God. We all want the real thing though, don’t we? Deep down, we all crave the Absolute Truth, not just some nice, liberal idea that we think might make the world a better place. I don’t want to talk to my own unconscious, or my own subjective beliefs, then call it “God” … because it makes me feel good. I want to actually talk to God. I want the answers to all the big questions. I want to know what it’s really all about. What am I supposed to do with my life? How am I supposed to live? What’s the right thing to do? What’s the meaning of life? What’s the purpose of each and every one of us? What are the big explanations for everything? Is there a way to get all the way through to God, the true God?”

GodMeaningAnswerTrue God
Book:The Vampire Path to God!: My Desperate Plan to Contact God
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“Acabei aprendendo que a gente sempre verá alguém reagindo de um jeito diferente, conforme o sentido que uma palavra ganhe na cabeça dessa pessoa. Para você, A pode significar apenas A; já um outro pode entender que A é o que vem antes de B, C e D. Você pode olhar para o copo com água até a metade e achar que está meio cheio, outro pode ver o mesmo copo e pensar que ele está meio vazio. E cada um vai reagir de acordo com o sentido que dá para cada coisa na vida.”

MeaningSentidoSignificado
Book:Em memória
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“It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value.”

ValueMeaningNullity
Book:Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals
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“One of the first steps toward gaining expertise in math and science is to create conceptual chunks—mental leaps that unite separate bits of information through meaning. Once you chunk an idea or concept, you don’t need to remember all the little underlying details; you’ve got the main idea—the chunk—and that’s enough.”

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Book:A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science
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“The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as the positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such. And if freedom is experienced in this case in the form of rejection, it is not genuinely fulfilled. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly. Instead of integrating death into life, he sees in it the only truth of the life, which appears to him as a disguised death. However, there is life, and the nihilist knows that he is alive. That’s where his failure lies. He rejects existence without managing to eliminate it. He denies any meaning to his transcendence, and yet he transcends himself. A man who delights in freedom can find an ally in the nihilist because they contest the serious world together, but he also sees in him an enemy insofar as the nihilist is a systematic rejection of the world and man, and if this rejection ends up in a positive desire destruction, it then establishes a tyranny which freedom must stand up against.”

PurposeMeaningExistentialismTranscendenceNihilismNihilist
Book:The Ethics of Ambiguity
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“But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.”

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Book:Meaning in the Visual Arts
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“Maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we've produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there [...]? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning [...] can be sufficient to drive our behaviour. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.”

MotivationMeaningWorks
Book:The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves
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“In America a child can no longer visit the place where she was born a shopping mall stands there instead. In America a grownup can no longer see the school where she learned the art of growing sad a freeway goes through there now an overpass her memories of brick turn to glass the suburb goes from white to black and time speeds up so much she has to stay young forever and reset the clock every five minutes just to know where is there and there is everywhere because she lives in time and not in any space! In our country here the future is in ruins before it is built a fact recognized by postmodern architecture that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quoted ruins from other times and places! There are no buildings in America only passageways that connect migratory floods the most permanent architecture being precisely that which moves these floods from one future ruin to another that is to say freeways and skyways and the car is our only shelter the architecture of desire reduced to the womb a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!” Saddened by his own vision and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is portraying his own country now for the sake of… what? Applause? There isn't any. He veers down another path. “The miracle of America is of motion not regret in New Mexico the has face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla in Plaquermine a Virgin appeared in a tree In Santuari de Chimayo the dirt turned healer a guy in Texas crasahed into a wall when God said Let me take the wheel! And others hear voice all the time telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster to throw at the videos the voices of God are everywhere heard loud and clear under the hum of the tickertape and all these miracle and speaking gods are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!” Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.”

AmericaCapitalismMeaningPostmodernismRants
Book:Wakefield
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“Neither of us was quite sure what the other meant, but, as in dreams, our words could be taken in so many ways, which was fine too, because we liked thinking they had more than one meaning, one obvious, one not so obvious, one hinted at but so muddled that neither of us knew which to grasp, because each was so laced into the others that all three ultimately meant one and the same thing.”

MeaningUnspokenAndre AcimanSubtextEnigma VariationsMultiple Meanings
Book:Enigma Variations
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“Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning of belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place, a continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world. Patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it.”

LifePatternsMeaningComplexityInterconnectednessPatterning
Book:Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays
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“[Viktor E. Frankl] joked that in contrast to Freud's and Adler's "depth psychology," which emphasizes delving into an individual's past and his or her unconscious instincts and desires, he practiced "height psychology," which focuses on a person's future and his or her conscious decisions and actions...His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals.”

MeaningMeaning Of LifeAfterwordLogotherapy
Book:Man's Search for Meaning
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“...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.”

PhotographyMeaningLooking38
Book:Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
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“Why are some words bad? The idea that they could be bothered me as a kid. Words are strings of sounds. How could sounds be bad? But of course: words aren’t just strings of sound. They are strings of sound to which we attach meaning. And yet it’s not the meaning of words that makes them bad either. Just consider this list: poop, crap, manure, dung, feces, stool. It’s all the same s**t. And yet, it’s only “s**t” we shouldn’t say. Why is that? F**k if I know.”

LanguageWordsMeaningShitSemanticsPhilosphyPoo
Book:Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids
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