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Meaning Quotes

Browse 1351 quotes about Meaning.

Meaning Quotes

“Living a long life is not really the ultimate purpose of human existence. Neither is happiness. It is in aligning to your dharma and duty that you can live the greatest life you are meant to have. Your soul prolongs your life as required. Usefulness, functionality and your highest possible contribution to the bigger whole, with more inclusive purpose, will empower and stretch your life’s continuity.”

LifeSoulPurposeEmpowermentKarmaMeaningPotentialLongevityDharmaFunctionality
Book:Higher Science of Longevity
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“and what the picture is in reality is this spirit, that’s what a picture really is, neither matter nor soul but both parts at the same time and together they make up what I think of as spirit, and maybe that’s why my good paintings, yes, all good paintings, have something to do with what I, what Christians, call The Holy Spirit, because all good art has this spirit, good pictures, good poems, good music, and what makes it good is not the material, not matter, and it’s not the content, the idea, the thought, no, what makes it good is just this unity of matter and form and soul that becomes spirit, that’s what culture is, probably, he says, it’s probably just one person being like another person that creates a culture, for example wearing a suit and tie, while what art is, yes, art is everyone just being like themselves, and totally themselves”

ArtSoulSpiritCultureIdentityMeaning
Book:Septology
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“For whatever we do and whatever we create outside, whatever we make visible in this world, is always ourselves, our own work, and when we do not finish it, we don't finish ourselves. So he carries that burden all the time with him; every unfinished situation which he has built up and left is in himself. He is an unfulfilled promise. And what he encounters in life is also himself, and that is true for everybody, not only the so-called intuitive. Whatever our fate or whatever curse we meet, whatever people we come into contact with, they all represent ourselves – whatever comes to us is our own fate and so it is ourselves. If we give it up, if we betray it, we have betrayed ourselves, and whatever we split off which belongs to us, will follow and eventually overtake us.”

SoulMeaningFate Destiny Life
Book:The collected works of C. G. JungPsychology and Religion
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“We desperately want to know the true meaning and purpose of our existence, but we can’t unless we strip ourselves bare of all the things that have deceived us from the purest essence of our soul.”

SoulPurposePureMindfulnessEssenceMeaningMysticismPurest
Book:Mindfulness and Mysticism: Connecting Present Moment Awareness with Higher States of Consciousness
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“What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.”

LoveHeartReasonGodPainHappinessJoyDesirePurposeSufferingPassionEvilUnderstandingSinEmotionIgnoranceMoralityJudgmentGloryPerfectionUltimateSimplicityStupidityGoodLustManMeaningFallenComplexityHolinessBlindnessSovereigntyBadMisunderstoodDiscernmentComplicationDepravityApologeticsOmnipotenceOmniscienceScamStupidity Of ManBlindness Of ManOmnipresence
Book:Healology
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“To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.”

PhilosophyLanguageWordsZenMeaning
Book:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
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“There’s surprising relief and regeneration in finding ourselves within a moment of genuine grace, however small or temporary it may be.”

InspirationJoyGraceBuddhismForgivenessZenMeaningMeaning Of LifeMysticismTranscendenceWellbeingStress ManagementComparative ReligionCobaltsaffronDarrell CalkinsAsian PhilosophyCobaltsaffron RetreatDarrell Calkins RetreatDarrell Calkins SeminarPersonal Skills DevelopmentCobaltsaffron Darrell CalkinsWellbeing SeminarDarrell Calkins Workshop
Author:Darrell Calkins
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“Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

ExerciseMindfulnessZenMeaningConscious AwarenessAttentiveness
Book:This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
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“...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness." (p184)”

FearMeaning
Book:The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
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“A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales Acts like a sick god, but like a god. Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists, He knows things exist, that he exists, He knows existing exists and doesn’t explain itself, And he knows there’s no reason at all for anything to exist. He knows being is the point. All he doesn’t know is that thought isn’t the point. (10/1/1917)”

GodRealityExistenceSeeingClarityMeaningFeelingGodsBeingPaganismIt Is What It IsPantheism
Author:Alberto Caeiro
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“...the way that the words hung together to produce meaning had a logic that he could not follow, and sometimes he thought that this was because they spoke in images, immediate, sensuous images, that their minds had escaped the temporal relationships that had defined the language of the past and instead they lived in an eternal, causeless present, a world of pure simultaneity.”

CommunicationSpeechLogicWordsDefinitionsMeaningImages
Book:The Doloriad
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“My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid! So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the...the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact. And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, 'Look, I want to'...you know, Feynman would say, "If an experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong' and it's a very appealing story to tell to people – but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature and it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving. Imagine you were innovating in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The first few times might not actually work. But if you told yourself the story, 'No, no, no – this is actually genius and it's working; no, you just lost three consecutive bouts' -- well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up. It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building. And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.”

ThinkingReasonTruthScienceLogicThoughtMeaningThought ProvokingIntellectualism
Author:Eric R. Weinstein
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“Someone. Everyone. Anyone. No-one. One. One can't be everyone, but there isn't more than one everyone, at the same time. And at the same time no-one can't be someone, but anyone can be one, and also anyone can be a no-one. To sum up - everyone is someone, and any-one becomes a no-one if you divide the one part long enough by every part of every-one, so in conclusion, I have no idea what I’m talking about, basically.”

IdeasDifferencesTalkingLogicIncreaseMathematicsConclusionMeaningParadoxDivisionLackingNothingIdeaRiddleOneDividingMoreIdiocySomeoneEveryonePuzzlePartialityPartAnyoneMeaningsNo OneBasicPartialSumMoronismBasically
Book:Nothing is here...
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“WHAT IS TRUTH? 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. Poetry by Suzy Kassem”

LifeMindHeartSoulReasonPhilosophyGodLightTruthScienceSpiritPoetryLanguageBlackWhiteConscienceLogicWeightFoundationWordsMeaningSubstanceSpectrumWordColorsBlind FaithSuzy KassemBrandConceptVisibilityUnderstands
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole—intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it... Does it help? Does it move the matter on? When you ask a question that you'd actually like to know the answer to—what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death—they say that your question can't be answered, because the terms in which you've put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is—as we have agreed—the answer; so it follows that your questions must therefore all be vole-related.”

ScienceLogicMeaningQuestionsVoles
Book:Engleby
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“Logically, this kind of atheism did not prove that there was no God.... On the contrary, Southwell was typical in placing the onus probandi on those who affirmed the existence of God and Holyoake regarded himself as an atheist only in his inability to believe what the churches would have him believe. They were content to show that the Christian concept of the supernatural was meaningless, that the arguments in its favor were illogical, and that the mysteries of the universe, insofar as they were explicable, could be accounted for in material terms.”

BeliefHistoryMysteryLogicAtheistMeaningMaterialismSupernaturalFreethinkerNaturalismDefinitionFreethinkersCharles SouthwellGeorge HolyoakeGeorge Jacob HolyoakeHolyoakeSouthwell
Author:Edward Royle
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“If you ask today what art is, what its function is, what the meaning of art is and why one should create art, the answer given oftentimes by Western philosophers of art and those who special- ize in modern aesthetics is ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The modern response is that you just create art for the sake of art; but this was never the answer of traditional civilizations where one created art for both the sake of attainment of inner perfection and for human need in the deepest sense—because the needs of man are not only physical, they are also spiritual. We are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe.”

ArtFormIslamWesternMeaningEastern
Book:در جست‌وجوی امر قدسی
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“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”

ArtModelsTraditionMeaningModernismFallacyAssumptionsAvant GardeArt HistoryTrope
Book:The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context
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“The books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling sat there quietly, never calling out for attention or advertising themselves with gaudy covers. But even if they appeared to be nothing more than unadorned paper boxes from the outside, they exuded a beauty equal to anything created by a sculptor or potter. Even though the meaning of the words printed on their pages was so profound it could never have been contained by those boxes, the books never let on to their depths. They waited patiently until someone picked them up and opened their covers.”

ArtBeautyBooksPatienceMeaningProfundityPackagingDepths
Book:Mina's Matchbox
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“Life is one long story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, and in our quest for meaning, we make other people players in our own psychomachia. Sometimes the consequence of doing that can be terrible, like what happened to me. But it’s worth remembering that everyone is trying their best to look for their dragon, to find the heart of their story, and to then tell it as well as they are able”

LifeArtStorytellingMeaning
Book:The Passing of the Dragon
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