Selected meaning quotes

1. 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.

2. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

3. The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

4. 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.

5. There is not love of life without despair about life.

6. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

7. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

8. 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.

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

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

11. 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.

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

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

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

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

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

19. 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.

20. One hour of right-down love is worth an age of dully living on.

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

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

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

24. Life is not a problem - Life is the closest God has yet come to a solution.

25. Even a meaningless life may contain many good breakfasts.

26. 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.

27. 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.

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

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

30. Life is everything and nothing all at once.

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

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

33. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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.

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

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

39. 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.

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

41. Life is here only to be lived so that we can, through life, earn the right to death, which to me is paradise. Whatever it is that will bring me the reward of paradise, I'll do the best I can.

42. Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward and unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it.

43. The chief objection that I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world 'God' is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word 'world'.

44. If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

45. Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. It is not at all necessary that every individual symbol that is used should represent something in common experience or even something explicable in terms of common experience. The man in the street is always making this demand for concrete explanation of the things referred to in science; but of necessity he must be disappointed. It is like our experience in learning to read. That which is written in a book is symbolic of a story in real life. The whole intention of the book is that ultimately a reader will identify some symbol, say BREAD, with one of the conceptions of familiar life. But it is mischievous to attempt such identifications prematurely, before the letters are strung into words and the words into sentences. The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life.

46. Width of life is more important than length of life.

47. I've always enjoyed reading lyrics, trying to do them more than just lyrics, trying to have some more meaning in them. I know a lot of people are just happy to have a kind of broken word lyrics. I just wonder why, there's no reason why they can't at least attempt to do something a bit better.

48. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

49. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

50. 'But that's just the point,' groaned Bree. 'Do Talking Horses roll? Supposing they don't? I can't bear to give it up. What do you think, Hwin?' 'I'm going to roll anyway,' said Hwin. 'I don't suppose any of them will care two lumps of sugar whether you roll or not.' (ch. 15)

51. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

52. The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

53. 'A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.' [2]

54. A warrior must learn to make every act count, since he is going to be here in this world for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

55. There's no emptiness in the life of a warrior. Everything is filled to the brim.

56. It is not good enough to know why we are oppressed and by whom. We must join the struggle for what is right and just. Jesus does not promise that it will be an easy way to live life and His own life certainly points in a hard direction; but it does promise that we will be satisfied (not stuffed; but satisfied). He promises that by giving life we will find life - full, meaningful life as God meant it.

57. They make me laugh with their 'Rubicon': 'Rubicon', 'Rubicon', what does it mean ?

58. I got a hunger and I can't seem to get full I need some meaning I can memorize The kind I have always seems to slip my mind.

59. 'Without hatred where's the light? Without darkness where's the love?'

60. You want to be able to provide something, and you're pissing down a fucking well. It will suck you dry and take everything you have and, like being a parent, you can pour as much love as you want, and your kid still says, 'Just let me right out here, you don't have to take me all the way.' You're working to make yourself obsolete. I'm not going to make Persona - my movies are fairly obvious in what the people want and what it is that's happening; it;s not that internalized. What's internalized is how you process the information from the singular, subjective point of view. And that becomes the subtext of it.

61. 'I hear my father-in-law's response: 'Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?' (p.529-- final passage)

62. Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? ...I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.

63. I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.

64. There's nothing at the center of what we do.

65. What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?

66. Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that - the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives.

67. 'Maybe Christmas', he thought, 'doesn't come from a store.' 'Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!'

68. Religion and philosophy, philosophy and religion - they're two words which are both : different. In spelling.

69. Every man's life (and ... every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal ... love is a divinity above all accidents, and guards his own with extraordinary obstinacy.

70. Between the finite and the infinite The missing link of Love has left a void. Supply the link, and earth with Heaven will join In one continued chain of endless life.

71. I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me.

72. All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

73. Myth is the nothing that is all.

74. I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.

75. Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake.

76. Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.

77. Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.

78. If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

79. We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way - not at all or in an interesting manner.

80. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?

81. A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. - But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant! - Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I meant them or not?

82. A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

83. Having a child changes every aspect of your life - for the better, of course. The sacrifices are large, but what you get in return is even bigger than the sacrifices you make. I feel, in a sense, ready to die because you are living on in your child. Not literally, not ready to die - but you know, that sort of feeling in a profound way.

84. It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

85. Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, - returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

86. What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

87. Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

88. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

89. He would agree that life is a little worth living - or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.

90. Vereker's secret, my dear man - the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

91. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

92. Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

93. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

94. When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer - you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission.

95. Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.

96. Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

97. Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

98. Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

99. Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory...

100. To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence-this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.