Essential Meaning Quotes

#1. All professions, all work, all activity in the human world finds its essential meaning in the context of a people's cosmic story.

Brian Swimme

#2. A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein

#3. 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

#4. The essential meaning of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and abroad.

Stephen Cohen

#5. Will a nominee embrace and uphold the essential meaning of the four words inscribed above the entrance of the Supreme Court building: Equal justice under law?

Edward Kennedy

#6. By stripping down an image to essential meaning, an artist can simplify that meaning.

Scott McCloud

#7. By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't.

Scott McCloud

#8. When you reach out to those in need, do not be surprised if the essential meaning of something occurs.

Stephen Richards

#9. Specific units - such as memes are intended to represent have meaning when there is essential discontinuity between categories. Such convenient discontinuities are found in atoms, elementary particles, genes, and DNA.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

#10. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts

C.S. Lewis

#11. Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.

Marianne Williamson

#12. The precise instant of creation is when you choose the subject. (meaning that the essential thing occurs at the moment when he, the photographer, meets the reality he wishes to capture.

Brassai

#13. If one insists on calling all unsuccessful efforts failures the meaning of failure is really quite benign. When trying anything new or taking on any challenge, unsuccessful efforts are an essential aspect of skill building.

Michael Josephson

#14. Our healthy shame is essential as the foundation of our spirituality. By reminding us of our essential limitations, our healthy shame lets us know that we are not God. Our healthy shame points us in the direction of some larger meaning. Our healthy shame is the psychological ground of our humility.

John Bradshaw

#15. Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal ... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this

Friedrich Nietzsche

#16. Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

Alfred Stieglitz

#17. Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness
meaning recognize it as yours
then one can take some fear out of the world.

Adam Phillips

#18. The true essence of humankind is kindness. There are other qualities which come from education or knowledge, but it is essential, if one wishes to be a genuine human being and impart satisfying meaning to one's existence, to have a good heart.

Dalai Lama XIV

#19. Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

Clement Greenberg

#20. Mastering the art of asking questions is essential to creativity and innovation. A More Beautiful Question should be standard reading for all aspiring design thinkers as well an inspiration to those searching for a life of curiosity and meaning.

Tim Brown

#21. And just because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning.

Josiah Royce

#22. No new truths await discovery; everything has been given already. But it has all been scattered abroad and dispersed, misrepresented by analysis, dulled by routine repetition. The essential words have been prostituted. We must recover the vital meaning of these ideas.

Isha Schwaller De Lubicz

#23. In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#24. The 20th Century approach to economics, resource depletion and over-consumption means we boom and bust until we bust more than we boom; that is precisely what is happening. In a low growth economy, the true meaning of resource efficiency in business and in everything we do is essential

Phil Harding

#25. It seems essential to try to find some meaning to life and I guess Jungian philosophy is the one that's helped me understand myself and the world more than anything else.

Noah Taylor

#26. Singing in Spanish is much more honest, much closer to my roots. For me, Spanish is essential. I still think in Spanish, dream in Spanish. It's the melodies and arrangements that transmit meaning.

Juanes

#27. What is essential here is the presence of the spirit of dialogue, which is in short, the ability to hold many points of view in suspension, along with a primary interest in the creation of common meaning.

David

#28. Seeing how a hand carves out meaning with a pencil point lets us remember that the human touch is essential.

Jill Ciment

#29. My theory is that, just like with omitting a final comma in a list when not essential for meaning, publishers are trying to save paper and ink or pixels on-screen.

Bill Walsh

#30. Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

Maureen Corrigan

#31. That the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life;

Atul Gawande

#32. Empathy is an essential part of living a life of meaning.

Daniel H. Pink

#33. A good teacher does not get lost in the details, but points to what is essential so that the child or student can find meaning and joy in life.

Pope Francis

#34. The profound meaning of music's essential aim ... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being

Igor Stravinsky

#35. Hope is life's essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.

Dick Van Dyke