724 Meaning Quotes

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.

You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

The most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile.

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.

For a heart without love is a song with no words And a tune to which no one is listening So your heart must give love and you'll find that You shine like rain on the leaves you'll be glistening.

My experience is that it's precisely the ones who don't know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Even a meaningless life may contain many good breakfasts.

It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Life is everything and nothing all at once.

The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.

If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure - because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society - then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.

Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are.

The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable.

It would seem to me that If this physical life, of which we are now aware, does indeed comprise the entirety of human experience, then what we seem to intuitively know to be true is entirely backwards. For if this is the case, then it must be the despicable tyrant, free of any moral values, and not the selfless compassionate who sacrifices himself for the good of mankind that is truly the one most deserving of our reverence and emulation.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare-something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state-something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption. Man has always asked the question: what is it all about? Has life any meaning at all? He sees the enormous confusion of life, the brutalities, the revolt, the wars, the endless divisions of religion, ideology and nationality, and with a sense of deep abiding frustration he asks, what is one to do, what is this thing we call living, is there anything beyond it?

I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just... in between. I want the freedom to try everything.

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of sense. The meaning of all general, and especially of all abstract terms, became in this way enveloped in a mystical base...

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either or wit of sublime.'

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.

There is arguably no more important and pressing topic than the relation of science and religion in the modern world. Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. Truth and meaning, science and religion; but we still cannot figure out how to get the two of them together in a fashion that both find acceptable.

Which brings us to the arts, whose purpose, in common with astrology, is to use frauds in order to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on inside. And on and on.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves at home here on earth.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p.109)

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an afflication but learn to enjoy it.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning - at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

Alas! that all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene The actors or spectators?

The higher nature in man always seeks for something which transcends itself and yet is its deepest truth; which claims all its sacrifice, yet makes this sacrifice its own recompense. This is man's dharma, man's religion, and man's self is the vessel which is to carry this sacrifice to the altar.

Understanding sometimes is not enough to explain something. Only faith is sufficient. The Fuhrer in Nuremberg said: 'Woe to him who does not believe!' He who does not believe has no soul. He is empty. He has no ideals. He has nothing to live for. He has no sunshine, no light, no joy in life. He is a poor, poor man. What is wealth? What are possessions? What does it all mean? Problems come despite them, only faith is left. Woe to him who does not believe!

The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.

:are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the 'divine madness' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to 'live' themselves into the message.

Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.

The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with at stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)

Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow -- never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.

It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us. Our thought make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light. First, believe in this world -- that there is meaning behind everything. Everything in the world is good, is holy and beautiful. If you see something evil, think that you are not understanding it in the right light. throw the burden on yourselves!

The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

It just seems so useless to have to work so hard and nothin' ever really seems to come from it.

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: 'Who knows how to make love stay?'

'To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.'

In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. Every spoken word, whether uttered by a living person or by a cartoon character, has its facial grimace, emphasizing the meaning.

If you wants to get elected president, you've got to think up some memorable homily so's school kids can be pestered into memorizin' it, even if they don't know what it means.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words...

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

First, believe in the world-that there is meaning behind everything.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

Against Nature's silence I use action In the vast indifference I invent a meaning I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes

...the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero...

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

You will never be happy if you keep searching for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you keep looking for the meaning of life without living it.

I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, Sniff them and think and sniff again and try Once more to think what it is I am remembering, Always in vain. I cannot like the scent, Yet I would rather give up others more sweet, With no meaning, than this bitter one.

'perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow whcih turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.'

'Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. Fuck them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyse his work: If you see it, dear, then it's there.'

For a cap and bells our lives we pay, Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking: 'Tis heaven alone that is given away, 'Tis only God may be had for the asking.

The program for this evening is not new. You have seen This entertainment through and through. You've seen your birth, your life and death; you might recall all of the rest - (did you have a good world when you died?) - enough to base a movie on?

Is not true leisure One with true toil?

These two enormous forces - truth and meaning - are at war in today's world. ...And something sooner or later has to give.

What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

The first thing I remember about the world:is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which is at once the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?- Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die- Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

Pleasure is not happiness. It has no more importance than a shadow following a man.

I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we're not wise enough to see it.

A man walks down the street He says why am I soft in the middle now Why am I soft in the middle The rest of my life is so hard I need a photo opportunity I want a shot at redemption Don't want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard.