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Meaning Quotes

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Meaning Quotes

“Society often sells us a narrow definition of meaning, equating it with productivity or status. ... But a meaningful life is often built from many small purposes. Enjoying a hobby, listening to a friend, tending to a garden, laughing with family, learning a new skill... these everyday activities can cumulatively create a deeply meaningful existence”

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Author:Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"
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“Full of woe means greater depth, greater awareness and empathy. Full of woe means challenges to meet, mountains to climb, finding joy in odd, small places, finding meaning in dark times. And we've certainly got dark times, and many challenges... Wednesday builds resilience so you can walk the miles of Thursday. On to Thursday. We still have far to go.”

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Author:Shellen Lubin
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“Everybody is born with a song in their heart. Unless the song inside is sung, one remains miserable. Then the purpose of life remains unfulfilled. The moment you have sung your song, joy explodes in your life. You have arrived home, because you have poured your heart into existence. In that creative pouring one becomes part of the whole. All separation from the whole thing disappears. Then the ego is dissolved. And with the ego dissolved, birth and death disappears. Nobody attains it without being creative. Anything to be true, authentically true, has to be creative. Do whatsoever is your inner feeling to do. Find the inner ear, the inner listening, which can hear the small voice within, and follow it. Meditation is the way to throw you back upon yourself, so that you can listen to your heart and follow it. You cannot get a map of the journey. That has to be discovered by you. It is written within your being, but meditation can help you to reach that innermost core, where you can read the writing that you have carried with yourself forever, but which you have not looked at.”

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Book:The Way of the Heart
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“Love is the quality of the heart. Love is really the only thing that is valuable. Things have prices, but they have no real value. Love has no prize, but love has immense value. Love is the only experience that makes life meaningful. Love is the only experience that is not available in the marketplace. Love is the only experience that is not of the world, and yet exists in the world. Love is the bridge between man and God. Only love can penetrate into the unknown. Only people who know love know the richness, the joy, the poetry and the beauty of existence. Love is the source of all that is good, meaningful and beautiful. Love opens the doors to the mysteries of life. Love opens the doors to the inner shrine of God.”

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Book:The Way of the Heart
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“Joy and happiness immediately happens when you remember that God loves you, that you are fulfilling a purpose in existence and that in your own small ways you are working for God. The moment we realize this joy arises in our heart. Then life is no more meaningless. We are messengers of God, and we are doing something greater than ourselves. Remember this more and more, so that it becomes a constant undercurrent in our consciousness. You will start flowering, and just to know that God loves you kindles a light in you, which cannot be extinguished by external forces.”

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Book:Man is Part of the Whole: Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Compassion, Freedom and Grace
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“On the flow path, we are drawn forward by fire; by powerful hedonic instincts; by our deep need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose deeply fulfilled; by dizzyingly feel-good neurochemistry; by a spectrum of joy beyond common ken; by the undeniable presence of our most authentic selves; by a cognitive imperative to make meaning from experience; by the search engine that is evolution and its need for innovation; and by the simplest of truths: life is long and we’re all scared and, in flow, at least for a little while, we’re not.”

JoyPurposeFireFlowExperienceFeel GoodMeaningAuthenticFulfillHedonic
Book:The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
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“If I die very young, hear this: I was never anything but a kid playing. I was a heathen like the sun and the water, I had the universal religion only people don’t have. I was happy because I didn’t ask for anything at all, Or tried to find anything, And I didn’t find any more explanation Than the word explanation having no meaning at all.”

LifeGodHappinessNatureExistenceMeaningExplanationTranquilityPaganismPantheism
Book:The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
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“I thought my life with Kelli could be balanced, mitigated,. That Irene had just been doing it all wrong these years. I' thought we could hang out like normal sisters, run errands, go for lattes with Jessica Hendy, and every now and then go off and have a little temper tantrum if Kelli go on my nerves--leave her in the car, assume she'd be fine. I'd assumed I could indulge myself if need be, that there could be some kind of fulfillment beyond my sister's care--that I didn't have to give myself over to it completely. But here's what I needed to understand--what Irene understood. Either you were all in with Kelli, or you were not. But if you were, Kelli had to become your joy. Kelli would be where you went for meaning. Kelli was what it was all about. And Irene was right about this too-- it was like faith. It was exactly like faith in that you had to stop futzing around and let it take you over. No more hemming and hawing. No more trying to have it both ways. And once you put your petty shit aside --your petty ego and your petty needs and your petty ambitions--that was when at last the world opened up. The world that was Kelli. It was a small world, a circumscribed world but it was your world and you did what you could to make it more beautiful. You focused on hygiene, nourishing meals, a pleasing home that always smelled good. That was your achievement and more important that was you. Once you accept that, you were--and this was strange to think, but the moment I thought it, I realized I put my finger on the savagely beating heart of my mother's philosophy--free. When I was a kid, my mother had a lavishly illustrated encyclopedia of saints she would sometimes flip through with me, and I remember how she always made a point of skipping over Saint Teresa of Avila . She didn't want to talk about the illustration that went with it. It was a photograph of the sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and it was pretty obvious to me even as a child why my mother disapproved. It was a sexy sculpture. The smirking angel prepares to pierce Teresa's heart with his holy spear, and boy oh boy is Saint Teresa ready. Her eyes are closed, her lips are parted, and somehow everything about her marble body, swathed in marble clothing looks to be in motion. Saint Teresa is writhing. She's writhing because that is what it is to be a Catholic Saint. This is your fulfillment. The giving over. The letting go. The disappearance. This is what it takes”

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Book:Watching You Without Me
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“I was born subject like others to errors and defects, But never to the error of wanting to understand too much, Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect.. Never to the defect of demanding of the World That it be anything that’s not the World.”

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Book:The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
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“I then invited the mother of the handicapped son to imagine herself similarly looking back over her life. Let us listen to what she had to say as recorded on the tape: “I wished to have children and this wish has been granted to me; one boy died; the other, however, the crippled one, would have been sent to an institution if I had not taken over his care. Though he is crippled and helpless, he is after all my boy. And so I have made a fuller life possible for him; I have made a better human being out of my son.” At this moment, there was an outburst of tears and, crying, she continued: “As for myself, I can look back peacefully on my life; for I can say my life is full of meaning, and I have tried hard to fulfill it; I have done my best - I have done the best for my son. My life was no failure!” Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, meaning which even included all of her sufferings. By the same token, however, it has become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”

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Book:Man's Search for Meaning
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“He who needs something to rebel against is less of a social anarchist than he who seeks to create something against which there is no need to rebel. There may be no end to the ugly, sordid, and horrifying things against which an honest man cannot help but revolt, but there are also things that are beautiful, joyful, and pure. If it were wrong to attend to the latter while the former still thrive, then a hopeless perpetual struggle would become the only meaning of life.”

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Book:Social Anarchism
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“I am a strong believer that fate exists. That everything happens for a reason. That the people we have in our lives are in our lives without accident. There is always meaning. Explainable or unexplainable. There is no such thing as luck. We are all here for a purpose. All we have to do is believe.”

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Book:Confessions of a Wallflower
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“Fate has dug me a hole, and rather than crawling out, I’m digging it deeper. What Fate began with a post-hole digger, I have expanded with a backhoe. I think I expect that when I reach bottom, I’ll find some sort of enlightenment - that which would give my life meaning, like a buried treasure. It may be buried treasure, but I think it’s buried deep within my soul. It may even be shouting to be let out.”

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Author:P.J. Paulson
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“The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure for our uselessness is to take back up our stewardship; for it is not that there has been no work to be done, we simply have not been attending to it.”

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Book:Ruminations at Twilight: Poetry Exploring the Sacred
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“Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do. Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don’t look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?’ – you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got. Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.”

HumanExperienceHumanismDataMeaning
Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. ... If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to… what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place. I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realise with stupor how much I was gypped.”

LifePhilosophyDeathCultureKnowledgeHumanExperiencePhilosopherMeaningExistentialismNihilism
Book:Force of circumstance
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“There is no record in Scripture that an angel visited John’s cell to explain the meaning of his persecution. This great, godly man who was the designated forerunner to Jesus went through the same confusing experiences as we. It is comforting to know that John responded in a very human way. He sent a secret message to Jesus from his prison cell, asking “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3). Have you ever felt like asking that question?”

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Book:Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
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“When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world. Tom says that even words as basic as numbers are imbued with layers of meaning. The numbers we use to count plants in the sweetgrass meadow also recall the Creation Story. Én:ska—one. This word invokes the fall of Skywoman from the world above. All alone, én:ska, she fell toward the earth. But she was not alone, for in her womb a second life was growing. Tékeni—there were two. Skywoman gave birth to a daughter, who bore twin sons and so then there were three—áhsen. Every time the Haudenosaunee count to three in their own language, they reaffirm their bond to Creation.”

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Book:Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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“To pause long enough at the border of the mind is to feel the faint pull of the Infinite, the whisper that all our searching, all our longing, rests in the Almighty. ... In those moments, turning upward is not just an act of devotion, but of surrender. It is the acknowledgment that we are not the ultimate authors of our story, that there is a hand beyond ours guiding, shaping, holding”

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Author:Ajmal, from the book "Borders of the Inner World"
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“Love is always great. Greatness is part of love. Vastness is the flavour of love. That is why our so-called love is not love, because it is too small. If love is too small, it is not love. Our love is too confined, too conditioned and too demanding. And then life becomes a desert. And one feels that there is no meaning , no joy, no growth, no poetry and no music in life. And all is futile and meaningless. But we are responsible for the desertlike and joyless existence. Without love, we become dry. With love, there is joy. With love, there is growth. Love can only be great. The problem is that we want something mpossible: we want love, and we also want to protect our ego. The ego is small, and love is always great. They cannot exist together. It is against the law of existence. Either you choose the ego or you choose love. You cannot choose both. And in the conflict between ego and love most people choose the ego, because it is small and controllable. Then you feel safe and secure. The vast sky of love is beautiful, but one feel afraid to go into such unknown territory. The ego can be controlled, but love cannot be controlled. With love you have to understand one thing: love is larger than you. Unless one is ready to surrender to love in trust, one cannot know what love is. And without knowing love, one cannot know what life is either. And then all talk about God is mere talk. You don't know life and you don't know love, so how can you know God? God is the crescendo of life and love. God is the highest peak of life and love. Meditation means to learn to go into the unknown. It means to go into the great, the vast. And this adventure creates the soul, The soul has to be earned. Business people has no soul, because they live a soulless and mundane existence. Meditation means being ready to always leave the unknown. This very search gives integrity. Learn the art of great love. Those who have known love have known all. Those who have missed love have missed all.”

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Book:The Way of the Heart
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“Love is the most divine experience on earth. Love proves that existence is not wthout meaning. Except for love there is no proof for the significance of life. If one has not experienced love one will feel meaninglessness in life. If one has not experience love one will feel an emptiness in life. One will feel at the mercy of unknown and material forces. That is how materialists look at life. Life is just a combination of matter. and love is a combination of hormones and chemical reactions in the body. But then there is no significance in life, and without significance in life one can only drag through life. Thereis no song, no dance in life. The existentialist philosophers says that life is meaningless, but they still go on clinging to life. They talk about anguish, fear, anxiety, despair, struggle and death. But nobody becomes convinced that life is really meaningless, because life is not meaningless. Life has intrinsic value, but its has to be discovered. We are intuitively aware that life is not meaningless. Love gives us proof of it. A lover has no doubts about life's  meaning. It is only through love that people have slowly discovered the ultimate meaning, which is God, the divine. It is only through love that people have discovered the whole science of meditation, because in loving moment the mind stops. When you are really in love, in those moments the past and the future disappears, and the present moment becomes all. That is what meditation is. Love gives you a glimpse of meditation. And through meditation a window opens into the existence of God. That is why love is the most divine phenomenon on earth. A seeker of truth has to be both a lover and a meditator, because both these qualities support each other. If you love, you will be able to meditate more deeply. If you meditate, you will be able to love more deeply. If you meditate, you will be able to love more totally. Love and meditation help each other. They support each other. The whole man knows both love and meditation. He lives on the earth, but he is part of the sky. And to be whole is to be holy.”

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Book:The Way of the Heart
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“A “life of value,” as I see it, has two parts: The first is about one fulfilling oneself and finding meaning by prioritizing, or living the values that they authentically possess. When one’s life is consistent with what they truly value, then life just “feels right.” But beyond a more self-oriented approach to finding happiness and fulfillment, a good life is making positive differences to those in the family, the community, the country, and the world.”

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Book:Wisdom: A Very Valuable Virtue That Cannot Be Bought
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“Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis of our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”

HumanityHealingCompassionComfortMeaningVulnerabilityBrokennessThomas MertonPaul Farmer
Book:Just Mercy
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