meaning Quotes

“I don’t talk things...I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“We may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.”

“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”

“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.”

“I only insist that meaning is available in spite of—nay, even through—suffering.”

“A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy . . . through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.”

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

“JUROR #8: You don’t really mean you’ll kill me, do you?”

“Hearken rather, my brethren, to the voice of the healthy body; it is a more upright and pure voice. More uprightly and purely speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square-built; and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth.”

“I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.”

“She had the feeling that somehow, in the very far-off places, perhaps even in far-off ages, there would be a meaning found to all sorrow and an answer too fair and wonderful to be as yet understood.”

“Suffering in search of truth gives true meaning to the truth.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

“Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.”

“A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.”

“A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning...A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest”

“The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I asked. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said and then he pulled his eye patch down and turned and sailed away.”

“I buried a nickel under the porch when I was 8, she said, but one day my grandma died & they sold the house & I never got to go back for it. A nickel used to mean something, I said.She nodded. It still does, she said & then she started to cry.”

“We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives - we believe that we ‘make’ them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.”

“The woman’s last speech had contained symbols new to him and those which were not new had been arranged in fashions not easily understood. But he was happy that the flavor had been suitable for communication between water brothers—although touched with something disturbing and terrifyingly pleasant.”

“It was not possible to separate in the Martian tongue the human concepts: ‘religion,’ ‘philosophy,’ and ‘science’—and, since Mike thought in Martian, it was not possible for him to tell them apart.”

“You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.‘”

“To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.”

“Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.”

″ Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

″‘... it’s not enough to know what the future ​is. You have to know what it means.‘”

“We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we’re just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don’t mean anything.”

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

″‘What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind.’ ‘What does the story mean, then?’ ‘It means what you want it to mean,’ Hoid said. ‘The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.‘”

“Life is just a series of dumb decisions and indecisions and coincidences that we ascribe meaning to.”

“What is falling in love? A series of small coincidences that we say means everything because we want to believe that our tiny lives matter on a galactic scale. But falling in love doesn’t even begin to compare on the formation of the universe.”

“Forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear.”

“Those who believe will be saved! We must make something we ourselves can believe in order to bring meaning to our lives!”

“‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!’”

“Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”

“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of it’s complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”

“They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.”

“For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. As though the why matters. Don’t waste time on false constructs.”

“Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.”

“Suddenly, a new image had risen up before me, a lofty and cherished image. And no need, no urge was as deep or as fervent within me as the craving to worship and admire. I gave her the name Beatrice….”

“Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”

″‘I know you,’ he said, without looking round – ‘and I want nothing to say to you.‘”

“Meaning grows with the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.”

“I had a dream about you. I was sitting on your couch, relating my succession of ideas on subconscious influence. I asked you what they meant, and you told me that free associations were a bad way to advance my political career.”

“There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

“Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.”

“Up and down lost all meaning. Her world became a violent tumble-dryer, an endless, crashing kaleidoscope.”

“He shifted in his seat and smiled secretly. The pleasure of self-discovery.”

That means getting past Monday’s henchmen and journeying to the Dayroom itself. Thankfully, Arthur is up to the challenge, but as he finds out, his fight seems to be only one-seventh over.

Daddy’s too wrung out to help Billie Jo much, and there’s no one else to care. So Billie Joe must head herself - even if it means tearing up her roots, and leaving behind everything she’s ever known.

“Let me tell it to you the way it was, and you judge for yourself if there isn’t a meaning and charm in the decline and fall of this clock.”

“My mother named me Autumn. People say to me “Oh how pretty,” and then the name seems to glide away from them, not grasping all the things that the word should mean to them, shades of red, change, and death.”

“Zorba was the man I had sought so long in vain. A living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from mother earth. The meaning of the words, art, love, beauty, purity, passion, all this was made clear to me by the simplest of human words uttered by this workman.”

“Her father may hate her for it, but I’d be a lousy girlfriend if I didn’t see how much it meant to her. It’s her chance out of here, and she deserves to be happy.”

“He loved anything with multiple layers of meaning. Codes within codes.”

″‘That does it,’ said Jace. ‘I’m going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year.’ ‘Why?’ Isabelle said. ‘So you can look up ‘fun.’ I’m not sure you know what it means.‘”

“Don’t ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?”

″‘I think you were meant to keep it Peter,’ she said softly. ‘I think that’s part of the magic.‘”