Meaning Quotes - Page 15

One may suffer the long-term in order to grow in appreciation for the small things. For in short-term suffering, one only notices the large.

What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.

Our Ancestors knew that healing comes in cycles and circles.One generation carries the pain so that the next can live and heal.One cannot live without the other, each is the other's hope, meaning & strength.

Gemma B. Benton

Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.

Rachel Naomi Remen

How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?

The power we were given to think, is to enable us to live better lives, not fool more people.

Michael Brent Jones

We can stage our own act on the planet-build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils-but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds. We can only witness them-whoever they are. If we were not here, they would be songbirds falling in the forest. If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them. The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.

Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.

John Galsworthy

I used to think of work as a bad word. Back in the corporate world, work was something that prevented me from living, something that kept me from feeling satisfied or fulfilled or passionate. Even the word itself carried with it a negative connotation. Work—bluck! When I left the corporate world, I swore off the word altogether. Noun, verb, adjective—I avoided all of work’s iterations. I no longer ‘went to work,’ so that was easy to remove from my vocabulary. In fact, I no longer ‘worked’ at all; instead I replaced the word with a more specific verb: I would ‘write’ or ‘teach’ or ‘speak’ or ‘volunteer,’ but I refused to ‘work.’ I no longer went to the gym to ‘workout’; instead I ‘exercised.’ And I stopped wearing ‘work clothes’; I chose instead to wear ‘dress clothes.’ And I avoided getting ‘worked up,’ preferring to call it ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety.’ And I didn’t bring my car to the shop to get ‘worked on,’ deciding instead to have my vehicle ‘repaired.’ Hell, I even avoided ‘handiwork’ 92 and ‘housework,’ selecting their more banal alternatives. Suffice it to say, I wanted nothing to do with the word. I wanted it not only stricken from my lexicon, but from my memory, erasing every shred of the thing that kept me from pursuing my dream for over a decade. But after a year of that nonsense, I realized something: it wasn’t the word that was bad; it was the meaning I gave to the word. It took removing the word from my everyday speech for a year to discover that it wasn’t a bad word at all. During that year, I had been pursuing my dream, and guess what—when I looked over my shoulder at everything I’d accomplished, I realized that pursuing my dream was, in fact, a lot of work. It took a lot of work to grow a website. It took a lot of work to publish five books. It took a lot of work to embark on a coast-to-coast tour. It took a lot of work to teach my first writing class. It took a lot of work to pursue my dream. Work wasn’t the problem. What I did as my work was the problem. I wasn’t passionate about my work before—my work wasn’t my mission—and so I wanted to escape from work so I could live a more rewarding life, looking to balance out the tedium of the daily grind. But work and life don’t work that way. Even when you’re pursuing your dream, there will be times of boredom and stress and long stretches of drudgery. That’s alright. It’s all worth it in the end. When your work becomes your life’s mission, you no longer need a work-life balance.

Joshua Fields Millburn

Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?

Alain de Botton

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.

Alain de Botton

Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good........An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

Alain de Botton

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.

Alain de Botton

Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.

Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.

Novalis

The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.

Constance Penley

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

Jeanette Winterson

No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.

Krishna Udayasankar

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.

László Krasznahorkai

Without understanding, there is no life. Either you act, out of understanding or act to develop understanding out of it.

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.

John H. Groberg

Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)

The world is full of disappointment," I said."Yes," she said, "I heard him say that. And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?""No," I said. "There's more than that.""Like what?""Like good books," I said, "and good people. And good librarians, who are almost both at once.

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.

Ai Weiwei

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.

But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.

But you possess one quality that no one else does. Oh? Your identity. Your history, deeds and situation. Use those to shape your creation and you will produce something unique. Whatever you make, base it upon that which is most important to you. Only then will it have depth and meaning, and only then will it resonate with others.

Christopher Paolini

Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?

It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

Lawrence Durrell

When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

Margaret Atwood

When direction and meaning are confined to Executive Leadership, value is minimized.

When an employee truly understands the meaning of his work and gets recognition for his efforts he performs the best.

A truly successful life is one filled with friends so it helps if people like being around you. If you suspect they don’t, have a think about how strongly you exhibit ‘likeable’ qualities such as listening well, being trustworthy, kind, generous, compassionate, fun, positive and unselfish. The good news is that you can learn such qualities even if they don’t come naturally to you.

Nigel Cumberland

If you don’t know what you value in life, then you won’t be able to make any meaningful decisions you can live with in the future.

Shannon L. Alder

The essential difference with Builders is that they've found something to do that matters to them and are therefore so passionately engaged, they rise above the personality baggage that would otherwise hold them down. Whatever they are doing has so much meaning to them that the cause itself provides charisma and they plug into it as if it was electrical current.

When you put together deep knowledge about a subject that intensely matters to you, charisma happens. You gain courage to share your passion, and when you do that, folks follow.

WHAT IS TRUTH?Truth is not a thingOr a concept.It is as multidimensionalIn its meaningAs it is in its reflection.It is both invisibleAnd visible.It carries tons of weight,But can be carried.It is understood first through the spiritBefore science,And felt in the heart,Before the mind.Truth is not always heard by reason,Because reason sometimesIgnores Truth.Always listen to your conscience.Your conscience is your heartAnd reason is your mind.Your mind is simply there to reasonWith your heart.But remember,Truth is in your heart,And only through your heartCan you connect to the light of God.He who is not motivated by his heartWill not see Truth,And he who thinks only with his mindWill be blind to Truth.He who does not thinkWith his conscience,Does not stand by God,For the language of lightCan only be decoded by the heart.He who reads and recites words of GodAlso does not stand by God –If he merely understandsWords with his mindBut not his heart.Truth is black and white,And the entire spectrumOf colors in-between.It can have many parts,But has a solid foundation.Truth lacks perfection,For it is the reflection of all,Yet its reflection as a whole,Is more beautifulThan the accumulated flawsOf the small.Truth is the only brandWorth breathingAnd believing.So stand for truthIn everything you do,And only thenDoes your life haveMeaning.Poetry by Suzy Kassem

I don't care what anyone says, the stars give you hope on a dark and gloomy night.

How many infinite lives have been lived since man first had consciousness or awareness of his soul?And how many of those souls have stared up at the stars in wonder; pondered the meaning of their existence, the meaning of life, the thoughts of their ancestors, dreamed of the futures of his offspring and the purpose of all that is man?How long will we wander before the truth is found?

Morris R. Gates

I see you better in music, I hear you better in wind, I feel you more in a flooding moonlight, that understands nothing, but darkness and silence.

Anthony Liccione

The dead are immune from our prison of Time. The distance between the living and dead may be vast, but the space of Time the dead experience when they are reunited with their loved ones is only paper-thin.

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

A flame that flickered,And a soul that whimpered,A candle that blazed,And a fragrance that raised. The flames were fed the same,But one remained diminished,While the other touched vintage!

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

What matters is what appears in your soul, not what your eyes see and what you can name.

Zdzisław Beksiński

We have been cut off from our souls in the West, and because romantic love has become our religion, we think we can find fulfillment through this extraordinary and powerful force that draws us into an illusion of permanence. Passion makes us feel alive, makes us sing, makes us feel in touch with something powerful and wonderful, just as it would if we followed this meaning in life in a more spiritual practice. In the West it is often through such relationships, through another human being, that we search desperately for something, not knowing it is to be found within ourselves.

There’s a drive in a lost soul—in one that is searching for acceptance, companionship, belonging, whatever you want to call it. The slightest coincidence ignites a spark that one hopes will lead to something meaningful.

Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.

Nikolai A. Berdyaev

Without Christ a people may always have the freedom to do, but never the power to complete.

A mark of true Christianity will be its intellectual vigour and its search for meaning in every aspect of life. True Christianity will always be critical, questioning and continually developing in its understanding of God and of human life. The subject matter for religion is every human experience. In Christian understanding, God is immanent, that is, God is present in all things, and creation itself is a sign, and an effective sign, of God’s presence - a sacrament. That is why there has been such an emphasis on scholarship and learning in the Christian tradition. Faith, as St Anselm wrote, ‘seeks understanding’, for it is the nature of true faith to trust that God is at work in everything and that there is no question which falls outside the scope of religious inquiry. When faith in God weakens, the critical element will also weaken, and there will be more warning against false doctrines than encouragement to develop our understanding. If the critical element is not fostered, Christians will remain infantile in their religious belief and practice, which will have little or no relation to everyday life and behaviour.

Some of the simplest of truths are also some of the most difficult of truths, but such is Christianity: 'If it's not about Christ, it's not about life.

Why in the world have we never found what we’re really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won’t accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Madeleine L'Engle

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