Top 100 About Meaning Quotes
#1. 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
#2. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).
Steven James
#3. But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.
Stephen Greenblatt
#4. Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.
David Christian
#5. The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of non-being. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith.
Paul Tillich
#7. Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis's rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When
Alister E. McGrath
#8. There is one thing we know about meaning, that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life.
Joel Garreau
#10. We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.
David Cronenberg
#11. Jokes are a lot about meaning. I think if we understand what jokes mean and why they work, we'd understand everything else. Genuinely I do.
John Lloyd
#12. Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.
Lawrence Wright
#13. You're talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.
Garry Winogrand
#14. Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically ... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.
Win Butler
#15. What was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty.
Piper Kerman
#16. Well, she asked him questions about his age and his attainments. The fact that he was a Catholic gave her pause, but when I explained to her that the present Pope was a well-meaning sort of chap, she said she was prepared to meet him halfway.
Elizabeth Cadell
#17. The perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.
Viktor E. Frankl
#18. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#19. For me philosophy begins with these experiences of disappointment: a disappointment at the level of what I would think of as "meaning," namely that, given that there is no God, what is the meaning of life? And, given that we live in an unjust world, how are we to bring about justice?
Simon Critchley
#20. My principles are about love and doing it because there's meaning and commitment.
Richelle Mead
#21. I'm not a garden expert in any sense of the meaning, only someone who blunders about in the shrubbery.
Mirabel Osler
#22. The sciences paint an impersonal and objective account of the world, deliberately devoid of "meaning", telling us about origins and mechanics of life, by revealing nothing of the joys and sorrows of living.
John Barrow
#23. Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought about the insignificance of grandeur, about the insignificance of life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and about the still greater insignificance of death, the meaning of which no one among the living could understand or explain.
Leo Tolstoy
#24. I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.
Jim Morrison
#25. The shelf life of my own opinion is somewhere between 3 seconds to 3 months, especially when it is about life and its meaning!
... But my recorded opinions definitely reflect my growing up for me, sometimes we do grow up in 3 seconds after we express something! ... yes we do!
Madura Aka Tirunelveli Tamizhachchi
#26. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess
Mortimer J. Adler
#27. To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.
Dan Brown
#28. Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing.
Stanley Spencer
#29. Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.
Richard Dawkins
#30. I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.
Erica Jong
#31. The thing about me that seems to puzzle people the most - people who know me, who believe what i tell them - is that I can write the most profound things without actually meaning them.
I can persuade people of things I don't believe myself,or (more usually) simply don't care about
K.J. Parker
#32. Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.
Raymond Chandler
#33. We've established a Washington State Academy of Sciences that will enable us to make decisions based on science about what is right for our state, meaning the quality of our lives will get better.
Christine Gregoire
#34. Perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with love: he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and the beauty it bears for him.
George Eliot
#35. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'
Maya Angelou
#36. I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.
Michael Heizer
#37. The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.
N. Scott Momaday
#38. At these moments I need my reading easy and quick; I need to turn the pages without knowing it. I don't have the bandwidth to wonder about the underlying meaning of the exact word chosen to phrase how one turned around or analyze just why an object was described in a certain
Lauren Leto
#39. Do I have to see movies and television about the English throne or the Holocaust every year? There are multiple multi-million dollar movies with the same backdrop. But our Holocaust - meaning Latino - aren't ever told.
Esai Morales
#40. A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone's trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.
Rebecca Solnit
#41. Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
Studs Terkel
#42. I've never been a snob. It [movie] is just about stories. And I've never felt just because it's a big screen and you plop down your eight bucks that gives it a special meaning. It's just "Are you good at telling a story?"
Steven Soderbergh
#43. Meditation is not thinking about the image of a person of the past. It is more about focusing and channelizing the power of your emotions and imagination for fulfilling a bigger dream - the dream that will bring more life, energy peace, happiness and meaning to you and the society.
Amit Ray
#44. 'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche.
Susan Orlean
#45. Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.
Tod Machover
#46. It's not about success and failure. It's not about good days and bad days. It's not about wealth or poverty. It's not about health or sickness. It's not even about life or death. It's about glorifying God in whatever circumstance you find yourself in.
Mark Batterson
#47. Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated ... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.
Solomon Asch
#48. People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don't happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.
Jodi Picoult
#49. The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.
Bill Toomey
#50. Give yourself permission to see and feel the extraordinary events in your own life. In internalizing them, you also will find your perspective about life and its meaning will change, resulting in growth and expansion of your soul.
Susan Barbara Apollon
#51. On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,
And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.
Alberto Caeiro
#52. It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,
Gertrude Stein
#53. Everyone chats and smiles, chats about nothing, shouts and drinks themselves silly occasionally or all the time. They they die one fine day, old or young, they die, tucked up into the earth. That's what it's like. Swarming lives, with no meaning, no number.
Erik Fosnes Hansen
#54. All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.
John Ruskin
#55. Staring at the wreckage of the life we could have had, I knew it wasn't about love or Shay or the Searchers now. It was about sacrifice and redemption, loss that could have new meaning.
Andrea Cremer
#56. The REAL American Dream is not about a garage full of new cars, winning the lottery, or retiring to a life of ease in Florida. It's about doing work that has meaning, work that makes a difference, and doing that work with people you care about.
Joe Tye
#57. Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.
P.D. James
#58. If you love animals but think that veganism is extreme, then you are confused about the meaning of love.
Gary L. Francione
#59. A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.
Mac DeMarco
#60. Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult. That belief is the original and only defensible meaning of liberalism.
Judith N. Shklar
#61. If I have any complaints about my youth ... one is that many well-meaning adults lied to me. Not spiteful lies with malicious intent but lies designed to prevent emotional and psychological pain - lies told by the people who cared about me most: my parents, teachers, relatives.
Chris Crutcher
#62. Discussions about how God reveals himself to people have little meaning in a purely theoretical framework.
Derek Morphew
#63. A woman could be totally powerless, and still give meaning to her life by dreaming about flight.
Fatema Mernissi
#64. As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
Aaron Siskind
#65. When someone asks me what a song is about, it's like, I feel like I might ruin it if you ask me that. I feel like I did my best to explain the song in the song on its own terms as a song.
Kyle Morton
#66. Most employees are never made or allowed to understand the real meaning behind the work that they are doing. So, for how long can someone remain motivated about chasing something without knowing what he is chasing and why?
Abhishek Ratna
#67. I was reminded of our history lessons, in which we learned about the loot or bounty an army enjoys when a battle is won. I began to see the awards and recognition just like that. They were little jewels without much meaning. I needed to concentrate on winning the war.
Malala Yousafzai
#68. Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life.
Antoni Tapies
#69. Instinctively it is the small things that make the biggest of differences.Men of a certain type are about showing off and the grand gestures.The gesture tends to overwhelm the meaning behind it.
K.J. Kilton
#70. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.
Paulo Freire
#71. No, I see it as meaning very little at the moment because none of the groups are about anything.
Lester Bangs
#72. Dreams make you click, juice you, turn you on, excite the living daylights out of you. You cannot wait to get out of bed to continue pursuing your dream. The kind of dream I'm talking about gives meaning to your life. it is the ultimate motivator.
James C. Collins
#73. Satan is behind the theory of evolution. Satan hates God and us. Satan is the father of all lies. So he wants nothing more than to make every human being alive believe lies about God, ourselves and how and why we exist.
Lisa Bedrick
#74. Why do you write meaningless philosophy?" you asked.
"Because it gives meaning to life," I whispered with deep empathy.
Debasish Mridha
#75. "Atheist" is quite clear in its meaning of "somebody without a belief in God." It is more complex in its usage since it has often been used to blacken anyone with the slightest doubt about the teachings of religion.
Jim Herrick
#76. The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn't quite as stupid and pointless.
MacDonald Harris
#77. It was to these books that I turned for an answer to the question: What is the meaning of la ilaha illa Allah? Again I was disappointed. The books were about Islam, not about Allah. They covered every subject you could possibly imagine except for the one which really mattered.
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi
#78. I come from a theater background, so I always like to dissect the scene and try to get some hint about what the author was trying to get at. I still look up the meaning of the name of the character to see if there are any clues in that.
Adina Porter
#79. Till the time, you are enjoying the outside process, everything seems alright, but when the query arises, about why life, you search for the deeper meaning with life.
Roshan Sharma
#80. Sometimes writers or writer-directors can get nuts about words, but you know and I know that it's the thought process behind the words that motivates the words, that conveys real communication and meaning.
John Kapelos
#82. There's something about uninterrupted singing that just doesn't work for me, because at some point, I need my characters to talk. Without meaning to offend anyone, a musical like 'Les Miserables' would be the last thing I'd ever be interested in.
Pedro Almodovar
#83. By believing your work is a 'gift,' it radically changes what you create. I think this is a revolutionary idea. It's no longer about client approval or a paycheck, but aspiring to make work that has meaning and purpose in your life and for your audience.
James Victore
#84. What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.
Reid Hoffman
#85. There is rising concern about pesticides, used on plants for food, causing endocrine disruption, meaning that the residual pesticides appear to be changing hormone levels in our populations.
Daniel G. Amen
#86. Contrary to the common misconception that loving yourself equates to being self-absorbed and lacking empathy or consideration for others, the true meaning of self-love is about caring, respecting and knowing yourself, taking responsibility for your life, and ultimately, your happiness.
Miya Yamanouchi
#87. The world is crazy about amassing guns, bombs and wealth of humongous proportions, but it will not give knowledge a second glance!
Avijeet Das
#88. Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.
Eduardo Paes
#89. People love books because they're searching for answers to deep, unconscious questions - and books get as close as it's possible to get.
Carla H. Krueger
#90. What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.
V.S. Ramachandran
#91. It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.
Richard Gist
#92. The committee's work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past.
Ruth J. Simmons
#93. Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Gore Vidal
#94. People talk about method actors, meaning someone that's prepared very, very well, or whatever they mean when they talk about it. But the right method is whatever works for you. And what works for me on any given day is going to be different.
Viggo Mortensen
#95. Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.
Paul Provenza
#96. When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.
Denis Johnson
#97. If I can't allow you to be a person in your own right, then I can't empathize with you. I'll always take your experience as meaning something about me. Or I'll react to your feelings by thinking of myself, not you.
Henry Cloud
#98. A part of me was like, 'Man, do I even like doing this anymore?' That whole thing of 'I'm in my 30s, and I sing and write songs while people are fighting wars in Iraq.' You know? So everything had to have more meaning, and it couldn't just be about making money. So, I took a minute.
Maxwell
#99. To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#100. All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.
Donald Kagan
