meaningful Quotes

“It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”

“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”

“All stories are true.”

“...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”

“The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.”

“‘No matter what happens,’ she said quietly, ‘I want to thank you.’ Chaol tilted his head to the side. ‘For what?’ Her eyes stung, but she blamed it on the fierce wind and blinked away the dampness. ‘For making my freedom mean something.’”

“I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”

“It seems strange to many people that I should be impressed by the wonders and beauties of Niagara. They are always asking: ‘what does this beauty or that 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.”

“Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending.”

“Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass.”

“A mind fed daily on TV diminishes. Your mind was made to know and love God.”

“Prayer is a way of asking for something. It is the medium of miracles. But the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness, because those who have been forgiven have everything.”

“Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we’re sworn”

“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”

“He had done this. He had brought all this about. In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him.”

“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?”

“We should never let what we cannot do keep us from doing what we can do. A passive life does not become a meaningful life.”

“When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” He chuckled again. “Knowing that rather takes the glamour out of fortunetelling—makes it the simplest, most obvious thing imaginable.”

“When we understand that, our question will change from, ‘Why do we have to feel pain?’ to ‘What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?‘”

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.”

“As soon as I wake up… I remember that everything is interrelated, the teaching of interdependence. So then I set my intention for the day, that this day should be meaningful. Meaningful means, if possible, serve and help others. If not possible, then at least not to harm others. That’s a meaningful day.”

“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”

“Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.”

“Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will chose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless and supremely meaningful.”

“And that was why Lassie meant so much to them. She represented some sort of pride that money had not been able to take away from them.”