c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Why should I even bother? What's the point, really?"He thought for a moment. "Who says there has to be a point?" he asked. "Or a reason. Maybe it's just something you have to do.
— Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.
— Jackie Robinson
It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.
— Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?
— Jesse Andrews, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
— Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.
— Milan Kundera, The Joke
Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
— Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.
— Max Barry, Company
So that's it. I've told you everything I know. Think clearly and think for yourself. Learn to use language to express those thoughts. Love somebody with all your heart. And with everyone, whether you love them or not, find out if you can be helpful. But really, it's even simpler than that. After all this time, and all these talks in public and in private, I think I get it now. If I were taking my friend Arnold's suggestion and spoke from my deathbed, I think I know what I'd say. I see now that I had my meaning all along, I just had to notice it. The meaning of life... is life. Not noticing life is what's meaningless, even down to the last second.
— Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Life was a revolving mystery, sometimes terrifying, sometimes maddening. But always provocative. Interesting. And although its meaning seemed beyond my grasp, it never seemed meaningless.
— Christina Meldrum, Madapple
Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.
— Voltaire, Candide
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--"Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.
— Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
— Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
Not only does my world revolve around her, but she is my world. She's not just my reason for breathing, she's air itself. She's the meaning behind every one of my thoughts, every thrum of my pulse, every whisper of my conscience. She's my entire everything. It's as simple and as complex as that.
— Laurelin Paige, Forever with You
But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.
— Elizabeth Hand, Illyria
When I told the rainbow what its colors meant, it laughed.
— Marty Rubin
You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.
— Kathryn Davis
Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.""How terrible," said Farukhuaz."Do you think so? I find it reassuring. It saves me from having to divine meaning in every sorrow that comes my way.
— G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
if we possess a why of life we can put up with almost any how.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.
— Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
MDMA, it was beginning to be apparent, could be all things to all people.
— Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.
— Voltaire, Candide
I take a picture, but it's not about who is in the picture or the background of it. It's about the memories and meanings it holds.
— Kayla Davis
What does this beauty or than music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?' In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
The significance of life is living.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, What are You Doing with Your Life: Teen Books on Living Volume 1
When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.
— Roberto Bolaño
Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
— Jacques Lacan
Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Love
We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.
— Kij Johnson, Fudoki
Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.
— José Saramago
Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.
— Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
— Octavio Paz
Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.
— Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination
When the meaning is unclear there is no meaning.
— Marty Rubin
[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh, I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: ‘And what about man? Are you sure that the the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.
— Vincent van Gogh
Find what is meaningful to you and stand by it. Even if you begin to wonder if there is any meaning to anything, continue to be yourself.
— Jay Woodman
What's in a name?
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
— Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement
Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.
— Fernán Caballero
They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.
— Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone
Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough, both sufficient and necessary. In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context. But, here, now, I could rub her hand and she would sigh. She was a difference. Perhaps each person was the only difference in all these halls of unchanging ranks of books, kiosks, clocks, and carpet, and that, and that, at least, we had to hold to.
— Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell
Your muse ain't singin' on your MTV? Can't even see him on your HD TV?
— David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
— William Kittredge
Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.
— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superﬂuous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor whatshould possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization.
— Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, "I did see a few Indians on the way over here." And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren't any there.' I don't remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I locked the door of her cell behind me? That would be like saying that the writing of this book, over which I have labored for so many watches, will vanish in a blur of vermillion when I close it for the last time and dispatch it to the eternal library maintained by the old Ultan. The great question then, that I pondered as I watched the floating island with longing eyes and chafed at my bonds and cursed the hetman in my heart, is that of determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.
— Gene Wolfe
Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret.
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
For a finite being, an infinite path has no meaning!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow.Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: "Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also said to be favored by fairy folk. Meanings associated with it include money, protection, sleep, prophetic dreams, and beloved daughter.
— Hazel Gaynor, The Cottingley Secret
Talk without the support of action means nothing.
— DaShanne Stokes
Enjoy the stillness, sweet snail! Savor the spring breeze while it still means something! Soon enough, like summer tempests your tears will come!
— Walt Holcombe, Things Just Get Away from You
The intellect is a boat which can take us to the very shores of understanding, but once there we must leave it behind in order to grasp true meaning.
— Ashavan
If you zoom in far enough, the information is there but it contains no meaning. The meaning emerges as a collective principle of organization.
— R.A.Delmonico
100: Live This Day as if It Were Your Last.
— Richard Carlson, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and it's all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life
Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.
— Julian Barnes, Metroland
The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?
— Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance
It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.
— László Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage
You wanted to be the cheese,” I said.“The what?" "The cheese, the gooey good stuff that fills in the empty space when a slice is taken away.
— Amber McRee Turner, Sway
My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Believe me. Everything is meant.
— Ali Smith, The Accidental
Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
— Gilles Deleuze
Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.
— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
Why, what is it, how can flesh and blood come up with such stuff, how can flesh feel it. My lord life is strange. How is that Meaning comes to be? How? How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of persons or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes?
— John Crowley, Aegypt
I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
If you cannot create a meaning, the things you see will always look meaningless to you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
— Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
— Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
One must be a lotus to emerge from mucky waters clean.
— Will Advise
The word "preacher" comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
You will not live the life of royalty, if you don't understand the meaning of loyalty.
— Gift Gugu Mona
Search for truth, not for meaning. Meaning comes from the perspective of a person who interprets the truth.
— J.R. Rim
The core is harmonic regularity, the outer darkness is random noise, we are in the space between them. Every engine takes advantage of a difference. These two extremes are woven into each other. The eternal now is the processing of meaning.
— R.A.Delmonico
God will let you into the battlefield so you can understand the meaning of victory.
— Gift Gugu Mona
Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.
— Christopher McCandless
The density of meaning is external and context dependent.
— R.A.Delmonico
To find doesn't always require to search.
— Will Advise
There is even rhythm in being empty.
— Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
The meaning of life is to make life be more.
— Will Advise
Meaning comes from the unknown, from the stranger, from the unpredictable that suddenly knocks at your door — a flower that suddenly blooms and you never expected it; a friend that suddenly happens to be on the street you were not waiting for; a love that blooms suddenly and you were not even aware that this was going to happen, you had not even imagined, not even dreamed. Then life has meaning. Then life has a dance. Then every step is happy because it is not a step filled with duty, it is a step moving into the unknown. The river is going towards the sea.
— Osho, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Make it simple, but significant.
— Don Draper
Noise guides only as light blinds.
— Andy Harglesis
Usually, meaning tends to find you, in the middle of the night, and when you least expect it.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
The biggest catch need not be grandest at all.
— Andy Harglesis
Death is the destroyer and giver of sense.
— Andy Harglesis
Hippasus’ proof—or at least Nico’s retelling of it—was really so simple that when he finished sketching it out, I wasn’t even aware that we had actually proven anything. Nico paused for a few minutes to let us mull it over.It was Peter who broke the silence, “I’m not sure I understand what we have done.”Nico seemed to be expecting such a response. “Step back and examine the proof; in fact, you should try and do this with every proof you see or have to work out for yourself. ..."He again waited for his words to sink in, and it began to make sense for me. All my mathematics teachers (other than Bauji and Nico) always seemed to evade this part of their responsibility. They had been content to merely write out a proof on the blackboard and carry on, seemingly without concern for what the proof meant and what it told us.“But you should not stop here. Even when you have understood a proof, and I hope you have indeed understood this proof, ask yourself the next question, the obvious one, but as critical: So what? Or, why are we proving this? What is the point? What is the context? How does it relate to us? To answer these questions we have to step back a little. Let me show you—it’s really quite delightful.” Now there was excitement in Nico’s voice.
— Gaurav Suri, A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel
What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning.
— Raymond Radiguet, The Devil in the Flesh
Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ?
— Elizabeth Buchan, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
Meaning beginns in the words, in the action, continues in your head and ends nowhere. There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impartient — and meaningless.
— Pfister
Time is rarely the limiting factor -- more so, structure often is.
— Andy Harglesis
Divine presence gives meaning to what seems to have no meaning
— Sunday Adelaja
Too many seek the “good” life, whereas only a life of meaning will satisfy the existential ache within our breasts that begs the question of why we are here, what we are to do with this life, and according to what principles we are to live. This is a question best answered at the beginning, not at the end, of our lives, for the answer will determine not only the direction of our lives but also whether we will die in comfort and peace or in hopelessness and despair.
— James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
There is not a “true” happiness and a “false” happiness. Only happiness and meaning. The key to happiness is to realize that it is not the same thing as meaning.  The key to meaning is to realize that it is to be found neither in the pursuit, nor in the denial, of happiness. Happiness speaks to our health, meaning to our hope. The former provides for the necessities of life, the latter a reason for living… Happiness is the consequence of properly loving ourselves. Meaning is the consequence of loving others as ourselves.
— James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
The journey to faith begins in a yearning for meaning and ends in love. Love is born out of the gratitude of a heart broken over its own sin and mended by grace. I would wish for a heart so broken that my gratitude, and therefore my love, would know no limits.
— James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
Levinas describes that faith as crucial to what it means to be human: (...) "its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies being over that which assures it".
— Bert H. Hodges
Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
The meaning of life is that it ends
— Franz Kafka
No action is safe from meaning.
— Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.
— Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
Thank you.” I’ve said thank you thousands of times in my life. Most of the time I mean it to some degree. There are times when I’ve said it and felt the gratitude behind the words wholeheartedly, but I don’t think I ever understood what those two words truly meant until this very moment. Now I think I need a new phrase because thank you is insufficient in this situation.
— Kim Holden
They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?
— Jean Thompson, She Poured Out Her Heart
I think is sad, how easily we throw around the word without actually understanding the sacrifice behind its meaning. Love in its definition isn't about a strong feeling towards someone, but action.
— Rachel Van Dyken
Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
Does this means something!?- Does it mean that you are again on the same opinion... no reason to ask you... no reason to say it again... it's logical.
— Deyth Banger, Code
Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything.... It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Meaning can be found in action.
— Andy Harglesis
Definition is a choice.
— Andy Harglesis
Let us not be judged by actions, but by means.
— Andy Harglesis
It is as if the Caru'ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed.
— Ken Liu, The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
We have been so busy perfecting the means of travel that we have forgotten where we wanted to go.
— Arthur M. Young
People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
— Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass screaming past an infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper the more literary you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things…My nature is designed entirely for brief habits…I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it…But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
To fully appreciate the depth of love, we must captivate ourselves in the moment. Whether it is fate or humanism, it produces a great capacity for happiness with a throw in of anxiety, grief, and isolation. Use those whales as an insidious beginning to produce meaning and humility in your life.
— Luis Enrique Cavazos, The Five Virtues That Awaken Your Life
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
— T.S. Eliot
A picture is a personal diary where only the artist knows the meaning.
— Steeven Shaw
... And that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something — or tries to. People need things like that to go on living — mental landscapes that have meaning for then, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That what I think.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 BOOK 2
Life only remains complex with the individual perspective. Individual perspective cannot think beyond itself while life has to consider the perspective of each and every individual.
— Roshan Sharma
Things mean pretty much what we want them to mean.
— Ian M. Banks
The question of purpose and meaning becomes obsolete when you think beyond human life.
— Vatsal Surti, 20
But he thought that if the world was layered with meaning, then she was the evidence, right here.
— Lauren Myracle, The Infinite Moment of Us
[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
What is most lacking in the modern world of duplications and facsimiles, of endless information and intentional misinformation, is the authenticity that makes life truly meaningful and spiritually rewarding.
— Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
When you strip away all the layers one by one, not much remains to “discover.” You will never find real meaning among your selfish interests, feelings, and aspirations. The answers do not lie within you.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Life is Like a Book, You cant Just read the Back, you Have to Dive in and Experience The Story within
— Look Im A Cat
Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.
— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
You're the only person who means anything to me in the whole world, you're all I've got...""Well then you've got nothin.
— Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume 7: The Innocents
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
We all encounter random phenomena, arbitrary occurrences, chance meetings, and eerie coincidences. When we attach our own meaning to these events, we are feeding meaning into the random; we are choosing something arbitrary and assigning our own deeper purpose to it. The problem, though, is that we do this selectively.
— Michael Vito Tosto
To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
— Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life
Stop opposing the truths.The truth is truth no matter how you take it. It is not going to be changed for your inconvenience.
— Bikash Bhandari
A person must claim the meaning behind his or her existence. How we live is our final testament to what we believed in and our journey through the corridor of time determines our decisive character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.
— Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
When love is part of a game, it means nothing. When love is love, it means everything.
— Kate McGahan
How can you put human rights to a popular vote and call it democracy? How many times do you need to redefine or haggle about the meaning of the word EQUALITY?
— Christina Engela, Bugspray
Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.
— Ricardo Piglia, Blanco nocturno
That I talk about that doesn't mean anything, that my name is like this doesn't mean anything... that I watch this and listen to this doesn't mean anything - Meaning of All By DeYth Banger
— Deyth Banger
Love is just a word until you meet someone who gives it meaning.
— Kate McGahan
To survive is not enough. To simply exist... is not enough!' - Roga Danar
— Emily St. John Mandel
The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.
— Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
If there is no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert... I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old...
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
What else is there to do?
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
The white-hot singularity at the core of the Machine is – ultimately - a fear of death. It's the inevitability of a journey's end and the threat of a question nobody can honestly answer: what does it mean to make the most of a life? How can you tell that you've spent your time well? There is no metric, no answer key at the back of the book. It's a question that I think everyone had to answer for themselves, and hold tight onto that answer with both hands.
— Jared Stone, Year of the Cow: How 420 Pounds of Beef Built a Better Life for One American Family
Before the beginning of the world, the triune God existed as Father, Son, and Spirit -- existing as three persons, yet one essence. Before there was an earth, before there was a cosmos, before there was anything, there was the triune God existing in this circular relationship between each person of the Godhead. He is perfectly happy, perfectly content, and perfectly together. When God creates, what is the purpose of creation? What is the purpose of making people? Why is God speaking with them and walking in the garden with them? He is increasing the circle. This is how God made the world; he enlarged the circle. Adam and Eve were in paradise because they were in the circle of God's love.
— Zach Weihrauch, A Better Story: Sermons from the Book of Genesis
Transported to a different culture, thought often loses its subtlety and can even rampage like a wild beast.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Most information doesn’t constitute a story. Think of a telephone directory: lots of information, strong cast, but a bit weak on narrative. What counts in a story is its meaning. And that’s a very different concept from information.
— Ian Stewart
Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.
— David Harvey
Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does.
— R.A.Delmonico
Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism's integrity.
— Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
Phonocentrism places higher value on spoken language as being more primary than and thus superior to written language, which it conceives as necessarily corrupting the original Subject—the center of meaning.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
It is enough to know, too much to see.
— Sally Gardner, Tinder
A meaningful life is the life full of meaningful relationships. Create yours.
— Utpal Vaishnav
And what's beyond vastness? It shrinks...
— Jasleen Kaur Gumber
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?
— Virginia Woolf, A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary
Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness.
— Norman Cousins