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Meaning Quotes

“And then?" I said. "Then we shall go through the records and get the names and addresses of all the witches in the whole wide world!" "And after that?" I said, quivering with excitement. "After that, my darling, the greatest task of all will begin for you and me! We shall pack our bags and go travelling all over the world! In every country we visit, we shall seek out the houses where the witches are living! We shall find each house, one by one, and having found it, you will creep inside and leave your little drops of deadly Mouse-Maker in the bread, or the cornflakes, or the rice-pudding or whatever food you see lying about. It will be a triumph, my darling! A colossal unbeatable triumph. We shall do it entirely by ourselves, just you and me! That will be our work for the rest of our lives!" My grandmother picked me up off the table and kissed me on the nose. "Oh, my goodness me, we're going to be busy these next few weeks and months and years!" she cried. "I think we are," I said. "But what fun and excitement it's going to be!" "You can say that again!" my grandmother cried, giving me another kiss. "I can't wait to get started!”

LifeInspirationalPurposeTimeMeaningMortalityBeginningLifes Work
Book:The Witches
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“The young delude themselves that the music will never stop playing. So it makes sense for them to explore rather than savor; to meet new people rather than to devote time to their nearest and dearest; to learn new skills and soak up information, rather than to ponder the meaning of it all; to focus on the future rather than to remain in the present.”

TimeGrowthYouthPerspectiveAgingPrioritiesMeaningPresence And Future
Book:Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
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“Life has no meaning without the past and future; the present, without the past and the future, is the frozen moment. We all fight for the present, but if anything exists in time, that is the past and the future. Is it possible to measure the present? How long does it last? The present second is not the present: before we think about it, it becomes the future; when we think about it, it becomes the past, and the future becomes the past in the exact second. (This is a good argument about particles and waves since we cannot determine a particle’s exact position and momentum.) What time is there in the present? Only the Absolute is in the absolute present because the absolute present is timeless and spaceless. The present is eternity, and eternity is nothing.”

LifeGodTimeUniverseMeaningCosmosDejan StojanovicAbsolute
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“I believe in Life. I believe Life to be outside of time, powerful, subtle and spread throughout the universe -- a power something like gravity. There are many such energies. Once we are able to detect life it will boggle our minds for centuries to come. The shear magnitude will rapture many, and destroy others, but we're not there yet. We can say something is alive, or dead, but not if life is there or not. Perhaps because it is too quiet, maybe because it is so loud we can hear nothing else, but mainly -- I believe -- because we haven't bothered to listen yet. -- , from the Black Dog”

LifeGodReligionMeaningBlack Dog
Author:Glenn Hefley
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“The idea that the World can create itself from nothing is equally absurd as the idea that God created the World from nothing. The lack of the material world, space, and time in the primordial, immaterial state of the Being is not proof that the primordial Being does not exist. Also, the lack of a material world in the primordial state does not mean that the Being creates from nothing. The Creation, or the process of creating, happens in the interaction between the Being and Nonbeing. The immateriality of the primordial Being does not mean that there was only absolute Nothing in the imagined “beginning.” This Immaterial Something is the Source of Everything.”

GodCreationMeaningDejan StojanovicAbsoluteNothingUniversal MindSource Of Everything
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Worte sind die blassen Schatten vergessener Namen. Und wie Namen Macht innewohnt, wohnt auch Worten Macht inne. Mit Worten kann man im Geist der Menschen Feuer entfachen. Mit Worten kann man selbst dem hartherzigsten Menschen Tränen entlocken. Es gibt sieben Worte, die einen Menschen dazu bringen, dich zu lieben. Und es gibt zehn Worte, mit denen man den Willen selbst des stärksten Mannes brechen kann. Aber ein Wort ist weiter nichts als die bildliche Darstellung eines Feuers. Ein Name ist das Feuer selbst.”

WisdomWordsMeaningWordPatrick RothfussWorteDer Name Des WindesWort
Book:The Name of the Wind
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“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

MediaMeaningPropagandaMass CultureMass CommunicationHyperreal
Book:Brave New World Revisited
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“In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present. More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that na individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. And George A. Sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of "learned meaninglessness." He himself remembered a therapist who said, "George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act." One must generalize such a criticism. In principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism.”

MeaningAnti Nihilism
Book:Man's Search for Meaning
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“The people I love will mourn me, but I won't be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn’t worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father’s desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter’s attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don’t want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it’s melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down.”

DeathMeaningSignificanceEstatesInheritancePossessionsBelongingsPersonal Meaning
Book:Essays After Eighty
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“A litre of frozen sea buckthorn juice, fiercely orange, as orange as marigolds in full bloom, is defrosting in the sink. Sea buckthorn grows along the coast on sand dunes in Britain, but it is rarely used here--- unlike in Russia and Central Asia, where it also thrives, and is offered as a standard addition to hot tea in cafés. Legend hints that warrior-rulers and conquerors such as Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, who stormed across the steppes of Central Asia and Mongolia, tanked up their armies on the berries, and perhaps their horses, too. Sea buckthorn's Latin name, Hippophae rhamnoides, means 'shiny horse', and some historians suggest that in ancient times, after a battle, when the horses were left to graze, they would come back with glossy manes, having feasted on sea buckthorn. Others link the name to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus.”

MeaningHorsesPegasusBuckthorn
Book:Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
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“The lack of understanding and some consensus about the question of God shows the fanaticism of both religious people and atheists who have become atheists more because of hate toward religion than because of “hatred” toward God. Therefore, they cannot understand the difference between God and religion. Curt Gödel (1906—1978) noted, '[I am] against religions but not against religion.' Without intermediaries and 'holy books,' real religion is the desire to reconnect (religio) to the Ultimate Source.”

PhilosophyScienceReligionMeaningDejan StojanovicAbsolute TruthReligious People
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.”

WorkCallingMistakesMeaningCareer Counseling
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“Having had occasion in the past to observe Communist statesmen, I saw with surprise that they were often extremely critical of the reality ensuing from actions of theirs that they saw turn before their eyes into an uncontrollable chain of consequences. If they were really so clear-sighted, you will say, why did they not just quit? Was it out of opportunism? Love of power? Out of fear? Perhaps. But it cannot be ruled out that at least some of them were guided by a sense of responsibility for an act they had helped to set loose in the world and for which they did not want to deny paternity, still cherishing the hope that they would manage to correct it, modify it, give it back meaning. The clearer it became that the hope was illusory, the more clearly emerged the tragedy of their lives.”

ResponsibilityHistoryFailureTragedyMistakesCommunismMeaningDoubling Down
Book:The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
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“In Egyptian Arabic, the word 'insan' means 'human'. If we remove the 'n', the word becomes 'insa', which means 'to forget'. So you see, the word 'forget' is taken from the word 'human'. And since it was God who created our minds and hearts, He knew from the very beginning that we would quickly forget our history, only to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So the ultimate test of every human is to seek wisdom. After all, wisdom is gained from having a good memory. Only after we have passed this test will we evolve to become better humans. Man is only a forgetful mortal, but God — He sees, hears and remembers everything.”

LifeHeartGodWisdomPainRememberPurposeHumanityUniverseGrowthChangeForgetMistakeLordWiseMankindCreationEvolutionLessonsFutureErrorsMemoryCreatorMistakesManEvolveMeaningMemorableSpiritual GrowthMissionCreateBeginningForgiveMeaningful LifeHumanity QuotesGrowPurposeful LivingEgyptianTestForgetfulMindsHuman EvolutionMakerMortalPast MistakesArabicEvolvingFinding MeaningSeek TruthSeek WisdomEgyptian Arabic
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.”

SufferingPeaceSinHellWorstSorrowAngerMurderGreedVanityMeaningBelongingRemorseWrathKillAvariceFinding PeaceSinsSufferBelong
Author:John Connolly
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“Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.”

InspirationalInspirationInspirational QuotesLife LessonsPsychologyIdentityEthicsPersonal DevelopmentKarmaMeaningFulfillmentMeaning Of LifeEthicalPsychology Spirituality
Book:The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous People
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“From this vantage point, Jacob noticed the distinctive emblem of the Resistance on a patch sewn onto the right shoulder of Rommond’s uniform. It showed a white equilateral triangle with two lines horizontally through it, all upon a royal blue field. What it meant was the subject of some discussion, but some thought it represented an uprising that pierced the ceiling of Hell and the floor of Heaven, as if to say they would resist not only the Devil, but God too.”

GodHeavenHellDevilResistanceMeaningBadgeEmblemTriangle
Book:Hopebreaker
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“Am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts, but am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. There was a boy last night who I never spoke to because I was too drunk and still shy, but mostly lonely, and I couldn’t find anything lightly to say, so I simply walked away but still wondered what he did with his life because he didn’t even speak to me or look at me but still made me wonder who he was and I walked away asking Am I making something worth while? I am not sure. I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.”

LifeHeartPoetrySimpleSilenceLivingCreatingSingingLonelyWordsComplicatedDrunkMeaningProseWriterJournalCreateLivesSingWanderlustTravellingNomadBoyReasonsOn WritingDiaryNomadicBarSingerWalk AwayVagabondOn The RoadExpatSpoke To
Book:Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving
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“Achieve your big dreams and see the rewards and benefits that come with it. Do not give up, even when faced with challenges. Persevere and work diligently. Let your actions pave the way for your accomplished dreams. Stay attentive and keep pushing. Your hard work and dedication will lead you to a life of meaning.”

Life LessonsQuotesDreamsGift Gugu Mona QuotesGift Gugu Mona PhilosophyGift Gugu Mona LibraryWords Of WisdomMeaningDaily InspirationDare To Dream Big
Book:Exploring the Explosive Power of Big Dreams
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“they are a little more solid even in the exquisite nakedness of their existence and they glory in their reality and read music and dance poetry on the sidewalks and in the lavatories of bombed out buildings. we take their words and cup them in our hands and we take their lips and crush them to ourselves and dream the dreams and think of sands and faraway places and wish for death and pray they see IT soon.”

LoveInspirationInspirational QuotesPoetryLife QuotesDreamsNostalgiaMeaningPhilosophy Of LifeHappiness Quotes
Book:Industrial Madness
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“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”

RealityPerspectivePerceptionMeaning
Book:Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
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“In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.”

RealityPainBrainDepressionEmotionsConsciousIntelligencePainfulMeaningNothingnessAbyssBeingNothingLucidityNowhere
Author:Thomas Ligotti
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