c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
If you want meaning in your life you must give your life meaning.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?
— Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters
Who says we don’t want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it’s some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don’t we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?
— Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
The great mission of our day is not conquering the sea or space, disease or tyranny. The grand quest which calls to the hero in every one of us is to become fully alive--to stand up and claim our birthright, which is inner freedom, love and radiant purpose. By fulfilling this, we transform the world.
— Jacob Nordby
What are humans meant to do
—  why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning
The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.To all of them the logical structure is common.(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Life is a thick dictionary, where you can find the meaning of anything.
— gwenth
I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.
— Álvaro de Campos
The meaning of life is not a search—it is a choice. Meaning is not found in things; meaning is what you make of things. The world means nothing by itself. You give it all the meaning it has. Thus, the meaning of life is a choice you make, not just once, but every waking hour of your day.   Life is like art—it is all about interpretation. The moment anything happens to you, you interpret a meaning for it. The meaning you vote for then governs your perception, your thinking, your faith, your choices, your feelings, your behaviors, everything! Whenever you elect a new meaning, this changes everything.
— Robert Holden
We all have an opportunity and responsibility to create a legacy. A legacy which is resilient, sustainable and authentic." - Jim Cookson, Doctoral Student, Ashridge Business School, UK, August 2014
— Jim Cookson
Life is like this roller coaster you can’t wait to be tall enough and old enough to get on. But when you get on it you realize you’re afraid of roller coasters.
— Evan Rauch
The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.
— William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Every person has a longing to be significant, to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful.
— John C. Maxwell
Practices are cultural: they do not submit to the meanings that an individual wants them to have, either for herself or for others.
— Clare Chambers, Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice
When we are courageous enough to begin exploring the ‘Why’s” and the ‘Who’s' of life, the ‘How’s’ and ‘What’s’ of life start to come into focus as well. "﻿
— Mac MacKenzie
The spiritual journey is an adventure of exploration that gradually starts to open up before us when we are ready to begin asking the questions, “Who am I? and “Who are you?
— Mac MacKenzie
Right person, wrong timing doesn’t mean God was wrong. It means you were there at the right time to fulfill something else. Look for it.
— Shannon L. Alder
Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
There is no question- love is the answer
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
I mean, I think even God would agree with this at this point. God’s existence isn’t important. It’s what we do with what we’ve got that counts.
— Michael Ruse
Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.
— Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Theism, as religious people typically hold it, does not merely state that some entity created the universe, but that the universe was created specifically with humans in mind as the most important part of creation. If we have any understanding at all of how an intelligent agent capable of creating the material universe would act if it had such an intention, we would say it would not create the huge structure we see, most of it completely irrelevant for life on Earth, with the Earth in such a seemingly random location, and with humans appearing only after a long and rather random course of evolution.
— Tim Maudlin
Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces. We worry that we are becoming stupider, an begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.
— Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Because of our fear that we are merely excited matter and the consequent grudge that we hold against the universe, we feel lost and alienated, like a refugee far from home in a universe that cares nothing for us.
— Eric Maisel, The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path Through Depression
A man has to have something he can put faith in.
— Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back
To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.
— Ernst F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
— Irvin D. Yalom
What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,Even when there’s not a breeze at all, it seemsLike there’s a light breeze blowing for a minuteBut the trees are unmovingIn every leaf of their leavesAnd our feelings have had an illusion,An illusion of what would please them...
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
It is through the filter of our ego that we give meaning to everything we see, touch, hear, taste and feel.
— Gyalwa Dokhampa, The Restful Mind
Everyday has its own meaning. Find the reason of your survival of the day and accomplish it.
— M. Ganesh Sai
Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects.
— David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy
To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.
— Roger Ebert
Crossing the Rubicon of absolute pain is the only journey of purpose and meaning in life.
— Bryant McGill
What better way to oppose the monopolisation of truth and meaning than to go in search of their foundations within one’s own psyche?
— Daniel Waterman, Entheogens, Society and Law: The Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility
To find meaning in our lives we need consistent exposure to kids, elders and animals... cuz kids and animals aren't looking for it, and elders are the closest to finding it.
— Gregor Collins, The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann
Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
The inner encounters I have with animals—and will be teaching you to have— are exchanges of meaning.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
Yes, this is what my senses alone have learned:—Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
That's the thing about music. You get to make it mean whatever you need it to mean.
— Jessica Park, Flat-Out Celeste
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Hypnos
You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.
— John Connolly
She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.
— Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure
[Your] search for meaning in the world... can only really be fulfilled by the greater purpose that has sent [you] here in the first place.
— The New Message from God
How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?
— James Hollis, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute's Soliloquy: a Memoir
Corporate & personal branding both require storytelling to be captivating. Stories provide context, meaning & the opportunity for relationship.
— Ryan Lilly, #Networking is people looking for people looking for people
He who doesn't know how to put his will into things at least puts a meaning into them: that is, he believes there is a will in them already.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing in this life will bring true meaning and happiness apart from God.
— Jim George
The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.
— Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity
A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can make sense of. A metaphor, in this "experiential" sense, is a process by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another domain of a different kind.
— Mark  Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
Or, maybe what really mattered was that game of Crazy 8s.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, I Thirst
I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun.This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.
— Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life
Meaning is often found embedded in the silent moments of our lives when we can hear and see what matters most, the things audible and visible only to the spirit.
— Toni Sorenson
A crucial point here is that understanding is not only a matter of reflection, using finitary propositions, on some preexistent, already determinate experience. Rather, understanding is the way we "have a world," the way we experience our world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore, involves our whole being - our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we are bound up with a linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth. I short, our understanding is our mode of "being in the world." It is the way we are meaningfully situated in our world through our bodily interactions, our cultural institutions , our linguistic tradition, and our historical context. Our more abstract reflective acts of understanding (which may involve grasping of finitary propositions) are simply an extension of our understanding in this more basic sense of "having a world.
— Mark  Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
I like the word 'fuck'. The word means what it means, but it also means whatever you need it to mean.
— Lisa Glatt, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That: A Novel
Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible.Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity.Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Your life will always be the perfect classroom journey for you and every experience that shows up in your journey is here to serve you. There is meaning and purpose behind everything that happens. There are no accidents which means your suffering through difficulties is never for nothing. Your life matters and everything you experience matters. Your trials are there to help you become a better person and trusting this is truth will take some of the sting out of them. Suffering becomes more bearable if it at least counts for something.
— Kimberly Giles, Choosing Clarity: The Path to Fearlessness
It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth, and as the word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and have anathematized each other about the supposable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing, another that it meant directly the contrary, and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible.It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
If one should criticize one should always have a meaningful explanation to accompany.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.
— William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization
Take a stand; go for the right choice. Don't just sit for anything; stand for something. Be specific because sometimes, when the meaning is not clear, there us absolutely no meaning!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.
— Anthony Collins
Meaning. If you're going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.
— Franny Billingsley, Chime
The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
— Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
A purpose derived from a false premise – that a deity has ordained submission to his will – cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals — solving our world’s problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition – provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason.
— Jeffrey Tayler
We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them.
— Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays.The happy man does not look back. he doesn’t look ahead. he lives in the present. but there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. to find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment.But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. What have you chosen: happiness or meaning?'The interpretation of murder
— Jed Rubenfeld.
Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.
I envision a world in which the vast majority of us are actively striving toward our potential as human beings by spending our lives serving others through mediums we are most passionate.
— Chris Matakas
With battle-weary arms, Sheridan slugged his way across the luminous waves sending light-filled droplets splashing into the air like Fourth of July sparklers.Stumbling onto the lake’s rocky banks, he clawed desperately at the animal skin suit, yanking at the fastenings and peeling back the suffocating shroud in a fitful temper tantrum. He collapsed onto the glitter washed shore, his chest heaving, his forehead pulsing with pumped up veins.“That was a nightmare!” Sheridan rasped between gulps of air. “Like some sort of freaked-out acid trip!”“All suffering comes bearing a gift. Every pain is a portal. You must look at the hand of your suffering to see the gift it offers and peer into your pain to see where it may lead.” Kunchen said calmly.
— Phillip White
As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Overrated is order.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Beautiful is the man who leaves a legacy that of shared love and life. It is he who transfers meaning, assigns significance and conveys in his loving touch the fine art and gentle shaping of a life. This man shall be called, Father.
— Stella Payton
I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.
— Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal
Butterflies better understand than you, the meaning of love and sacrifices one must make for their beloved.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason — to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?" Molly asks when Vivian reads some of these stories aloud."It certainly helps," Vivian says.
— Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train
You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. the stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
who would expect less?" she said. " You're a Wiggin." " Whatever that means." He said. " It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
I decided that life rationally considered seemed pointless and futile, but it is still interesting in a variety of ways, including the study of science. So why not carry on, following the path of scientific hedonism? Besides, I did not have the courage for the more rational procedure of suicide.
— Robert S. Mulliken, Life of a Scientist: An Autobiographical Account of the Development of Molecular Orbital Theory
[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.
— Paul R. Halmos
And then a memory from Avalon surfaced in her mind, something she had not thought of for a decade; one of the Druids, giving instruction in the secret wisdom to the young priestesses, had said, If you would have the message of the Gods to direct your life, look for that which repeats, again and again; for this is the message given you by the Gods, the karmic lesson you must learn for this incarnation. It comes again and again until you have made it part of your soul and your enduring spirit.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.
— Michael Frayn, Constructions
There are people we meet who have but little roles to play in our lives, who happen to be no more than a special appearance to our story.People, who influence, who possess the drift, the force whose implication leads us forward in our course of life. We might have never come across them until today and probably not hear from them tomorrow or ever after, for all that exists is this moment, a moment enough for them to fulfil their purpose that being to help us find our way and enough for us to fulfil ours that being to actually find it, reach it, accomplish it. They are the ones who bring meaning to our lives, who happen to inspire, who spark a fire that we carry with us for the rest of our days, who are but pillars of hope and sometimes sacrifice, life-changers, life-savers, catalysts.
— Chirag Tulsiani
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Everything we do and think has consequences and everything is connected by this web and has a meaning. When we touch the web on one side of the world, it ripples through it to the other - and so on.
— Skadi Winter, Hexe
To be more precise... death is [contrary to] God, and if death is natural, if it is the ultimate truth about life and about the world, if it is the highest and immutable law about all of creation, then there is no God, then this whole story about creation, about joy, and about the light of life is a total lie.
— Alexander Schmemann, O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?
Sharing your life with someone will have much more meaning coming from a place of independence rather than co-dependence.
— Gary   Hopkins
Marriage converts a player into a polygamist.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered
The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.
— Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp
I have no rules. For me, it's a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You're looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I'd like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you're a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.
— David Cronenberg
We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Writing is the way I make sense of a chaotic world. I see the tumultuous backdrop of humanity around me, and I feel it is my duty (mainly to myself) to create a sense of meaning and understanding in such an atmosphere. It's all about timing. In a world without order, I create order. Sequence and structure, even in the busiest of places, allow me to be at peace.
— Leigh Hershkovich
The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?
— William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization
Who you are in Christ is far more important and meaningful than whatever has taken place in your past.
— Elizabeth George, A Woman's Walk with God
Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
— David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man. The love of God means wasted love. 'For God and Country' means a divided allegiance—a 50 per cent patriot.The most abused word in the language of man is the word 'God.' The reason for this is that it is subject to so much abuse. There is no other word in the human language that is as meaningless and incapable of explanation as is the word 'God.' It is the beginning and end of nothing. It is the Alpha and Omega of Ignorance.It has as many meanings as there are minds. And as each person has an opinion of what the word God ought to mean, it is a word without premise, without foundation, and without substance. It is without validity. It is all things to all people, and is as meaningless as it is indefinable. It is the most dangerous in the hands of the unscrupulous, and is the joker that trumps the ace. It is the poisoned word that has paralyzed the brain of man.'The fear of the Lord' is not the beginning of wisdom; on the contrary, it has made man a groveling slave; it has made raving lunatics of those who have attempted to interpret what God 'is' and what is supposed to be our 'duty' to God. It has made man prostitute the most precious things of life—it has made him sacrifice wife, and child, and home.'In the name of God' means in the name of nothing—it has caused man to be a wastrel with the precious elixir of life, because there is no God.
— Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto
There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Nihilism is…not only the belief that everything deserves to perish
—  but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough
We are born and we die; and between these two most important events in our lives more or less time elapses which we have to waste somehow or other. In the end it does not seem to matter much whether we have done so in making money, or practicing law, or reading or playing, or in any other way, as long as we felt we were deriving a maximum of happiness out of our doings.
— Clarence Darrow
If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What’s so special about humans...?', I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point....I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… 'What’s so special about that?
— Shelly Kagan
Perfection itself is not the ultimate goalbut the ultimate condition of life.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.
— Isidor Isaac Rabi
He realized this early on, and realized too that what people think are their lives are merely its conditions. The truth is closer than thought and lies buried in what we already know.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.
— Steven Weinberg
Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole—intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it... Does it help? Does it move the matt
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
. . . when we take upon ourselves his yoke of obedience, his yoke is easy, his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30). When is a burden light? It is when we find our burdensome lives caught up, elevated, borne aloft by something greater than our lives. Mission gives meaning. Jesus does not come to us to relieve us of all yokes or burdens; rather, he comes offering us a yoke worth wearing, a burden worth bearing. It is a great gift not to have to make your life mean something, to have your life given significance by the Lord whose cross, when taken up, takes us up as well. 119-120
— William H. Willimon, Calling & Character: Virtues Of The Ordained Life
Everything did mean something.
— Kari Luna, The Theory of Everything
We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear.
— Titus Lucretius Carus
For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books
One makes his own meanings as the counterfeiter prints his own money: both know full well that the value of either rests solely in the gullibility of its recipient...
— Dan Garfat-Pratt, Citations: A Brief Anthology
When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
— Lewis Carroll
When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution— We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry—the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth—from the worm to the dinosaur.
— Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto
I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for ‘[intelligent] design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!
— Irven Devore
Life is not something that "has" meaning. It's something we give meaning to. You don't "end up" with a meaningful life, you create it.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
I don't know what you mean, but I know that you mean it.(attrib: 'Edward', Appendix 2)
— Robert Robert, Orijjjjjjice
The purpose of life is to live. The meaning of life is whatever you choose. The secret to life is balance in all things…
— James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes Companion Journal
Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
. . .the most important philosophical question we can each ask ourselves is, ‘Do I or do I not wish to commit suicide?’ If we say, ‘No I do not,’ as most of us would, it is because we have reasons for living, or at the very least real hope that we can find such reasons. Then the next question is: what are the reasons I personally have for saying ‘No’ to that question? The answer contains the meaning of my life.
— A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism
If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
A VIP area is nothing without not-so-important people.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
The rich are poor without the poor's acknowledgment of money.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I only found myself when I stopped looking. . .
— Erik Christian
Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing—I am just beginning to realize—may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go.
— Christian Wiman
Stories give color to black and white information.
— Todd Stocker, Refined: Turning Pain Into Purpose