Top 84 Making Meaning Quotes
#1. We uncovered a phenomenon we call "the immunity to change," a heretofore hidden dynamic that actively (and brilliantly) prevents us from changing because of its devotion to preserving our existing way of making meaning.
Robert Kegan
#2. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#3. That's just the way I end up making meaning from the direct material in my life - I think what makes it accessible is the desire to communicate, more than anything. It does make it accessible, but that's not what motivates me.
Frances Stark
#4. My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting was to break the tradition, to experiment with it, to find new ways of making meaning, to question the relevance of it.
Shahzia Sikander
#5. My greatest fear. is to have lived in such a way to miss the mark, not to be able to accomplish my assignment on earth; making meaning and impacting lives.
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#6. Don't worry about your stuff. Worry about making meaning instead.
Seth
#7. The deeper and more debilitating form of powerlessness is to be cut off from making meaning.
Andy Crouch
#8. Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.
Daniel Tammet
#9. Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.
Tom Waits
#10. We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.
Satish Kumar
#11. I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what's behind thought?
Clarice Lispector
#12. Character is far more important than intellect in making a man a good citizen or successful at his calling- meaning by character not only such qualities as honesty and truthfulness, but courage, perseverance and self-reliance.
Theodore Roosevelt
#13. The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music ... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.
Rabindranath Tagore
#14. All of us want the same things. We want to be good to the people around us and for our lives to have meaning. For me that means making the world a little bit easier for women.
Sheryl Sandberg
#15. Death is inevitable. But the meaning people attach to death, its causes and aftermath, is culturally given. Without meaning, without culture making sense of things, life would be impossible.
Richard B. Lee
#16. The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.
Matthew Stewart
#17. Commitment is not a barrier to freedom. Commitment is the *exercise* of freedom, the act of making a choice or decision and meaning it. The one without the other is meaningless.
Michael Rosen
#18. The true meaning of life lies in learning. When you learn, you understand the things better, when you understand the things better, it reflects in your actions, and when your actions are right, according to the process of life, you are bound to receive the desired result.
Roshan Sharma
#19. Embrace your struggles. They are making you the person you were meant to be.
Avijeet Das
#20. Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.
Seth Godin
#21. Sharing music is not a crime. It shouldn't be. There should be a deeper meaning to making music than just selling downloads.
Dave Grohl
#22. So, one, that DJ Spooky is a lot you know this sort of wilder persona and then Paul Miller is more of a nuts and bolts kind of person, meaning just making sure all these things work.
DJ Spooky
#23. The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful.
Peter Brook
#24. Eating, working, and making money are meaningless in themselves. However, even a small act of compassion grants meaning and purpose to our lives. P
Dalai Lama XIV
#25. Life is what you make it and legacy is what you leave it. Stop trying to be perfect, stop waiting for perfection to find you, and start making your environment a product of you instead of the other way around.
A.J. Darkholme
#26. Maybe comfort exists in believing there is order in the world, even when someone is making the most disorderly decision we know: running toward death instead of away from it.
In their absence, we're left trying to pin meaning to air.
Kate Fagan
#27. imagination is the image-making faculty of the intellect that helps us discover, process, and creatively express coherent meaning.
Sarah Arthur
#28. And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making.
Ted Hughes
#29. Obama wants people, as many people as he can get, covered by the government, exchanges, however you want to phrase it, and the more the better, and the sooner, the better, making it impossible to take it away. Meaning, making it impossible to repeal Obamacare.
Rush Limbaugh
#30. During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.
Sol LeWitt
#31. Every life is a story. Every story has mistakes. If you focus too much on the mistakes, you will miss the story. In doing that, you are making a dreadful mistake yourself. Sometimes, it is the mistakes that enrich and give the story so much more meaning than it would have had otherwise.
Beverly S. Harless
#32. Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.
Ellsworth Kelly
#33. Unhappily the habit of being offensive 'without meaning it' leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.
George Eliot
#34. In war, {freedom's} meaning is bound to the collective, making peace and freedom the same . . . The collective is a mob that suffers in silence, and waits.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic
#35. 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
#36. World" as thought through Heidegger's work would be the mutually achieved composite of meaning and matter; what is disclosed - that is, what presents itself to us through our doing, saying, and making - is disclosed as already fitted into material environments and holistic forms of significance.
Thomas Rickert
#37. As the writer, you can choose the word that seems best in terms of meaning, nuance, sound, etc. As the translator you are unlikely to find a word in your language that exactly matches, so that you are always making a decision about which meaning or nuance to choose, or emphasize, over the others.
Ann Goldstein
#38. A man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making.
Thomas Merton
#39. Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.
Daido Moriyama
#40. How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?
Rebecca Goldstein
#41. He'd never been a believer in fate, but the last twenty-four hours were making him wonder about a lot of things. The one thing he knew without any doubt or reservation was that it was impossible to leave Victoria's side. 'She's everything to me. My life. My world. Without her, life has no meaning.
Monica Burns
#42. Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.
Jose Saramago
#43. You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.
Kathryn Davis
#44. London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
#45. God's love gives life meaning. I just follow the path He sets out in the Good Book. That's all I need to know. You follow His guidelines, it's almost like a map through life to Heaven. You don't ever gotta worry if you're making the right choices or not, 'cause it's all right there for you.
Wendy Mass
#46. Why must this happen to me?" To this there could be no answer and there was none. When I knew at last that there could never be an answer, my own resolve shaped into the determination to make meaning out of the meaningless, and so provide the answer, though it was of my own making.
Pearl S. Buck
#47. I rank money higher than social life or meaning because once you have money, those other things are easier to get. For example, you won't have much of a social life if you can't afford to do anything. And you can't make money if your health is a mess.
Scott Adams
#48. The meaning resides in one's own experience, making the everyday the exceptional.
Samuel Mockbee
#49. If you don't make Christmas presents, meaning making something that's so emotionally connected to people, don't talk to me.
Kanye West
#50. Fear reaches only to the point where the unavoidable begins; from there on, it loses its meaning. And all we have left is the hope that we are making the right decision
Paulo Coelho
#51. In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power - the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#52. The word 'friend' has become so utterly void of meaning in a world governed by social media. How can anyone truly claim to have eleven hundred friends ? In my book that would involve making time to meet at least three of them every day of the year.
Alex Morritt
#53. I'm a great believer in relativity when making movies. Relativity, in my mind, meaning "Light to dark, big to small, good to bad." You visually embrace these things to enhance transitions and instantly paint environments and moods.
Gordon Willis
#54. He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said.
Virginia Woolf
#55. The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.
Guy Kawasaki
#57. Meaning comes from engagement in positive work that challenges our personal capacity combined with knowledge that our positive work is making a larger contribution to the overall well-being of humanity and life on the planet.
Michael Strong
#58. It is gorgeously shot, and Andrew believes that the old school way of making films in the best way. Meaning: you have a story, and you stick to the story. You don't change and alter the story because of people who've invested in it and what to put product in a shot.
Michael Berryman
#59. Making it" in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don't make it, so you need other human beings to "fail" so that your life can have meaning.
Eckhart Tolle
#60. Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. ... We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed.
Joan D. Chittister
#61. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But
Garth Greenwell
#62. The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.
Conrad Hall
#63. An aspect of the work has to do with altering the literal/cultural meaning of existing public images by making minimal changes and additions. Using superimposition, juxtaposition and other contextual changes, I am functioning as a visual guerrilla.
Robert Heinecken
#64. Honoring Christ, magnifying Christ, making much of Christ. That was the meaning of Paul's life. It should be the meaning of ours. And Paul prays it will be the meaning of his death as well. We live and we die to make much of Christ.
John Piper
#65. The companies that are successful, they start out to make meaning, not to make money.
Guy Kawasaki
#66. I questioned everything about music. I think it's a strange thing standing on a stage and making music. I just questioned it always: What's music? What's the meaning of it?
Gustav Ejstes
#67. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue.
William James
#68. I was worried that if I told her the story, she would identify with it too much. That her sympathy, however well-meaning, would make me possessive, angry again. She was always making things personal, seeing only their relationship to her rather than what was complex about them.
Olivia Sudjic
#69. The mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained.
Augustine Of Hippo
#70. Sin isn't only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#71. And so the meaning of our lives is not dependent upon what we make of it but of what he is making of us.
Emily P. Freeman
#72. It wasn't like I was some expert on the meaning of being supportive. Was it being loyal even against your better judgement? Or, like Olivia, was it making your displeasure known from the start, even when someone didn't want to hear it?
Sarah Dessen
#73. Perhaps fate has a way of turning things around and making something good out of the action of someone who failed humanity without meaning to.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#74. The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it's to make meaning.
John Seely Brown
#76. As Bush said, after detailing some of Saddam Hussein's charming practices: "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning." It's not as if anyone is worried that we're making a horrible miscalculation and could be removing the Iraqi Abraham Lincoln by mistake.
Ann Coulter
#77. Making it big in this world is such a rip-off, you gotta keep your head together or it can be totally without meaning.
Shelley Duvall
#78. Meaning is not creating a cool place to work with free food, Ping-Pong, volleyball, and dogs. Meaning is making the world a better place.
Guy Kawasaki
#79. The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.
Jeremy Campbell
#80. Just the idea of making money can increase your skin conductancy, meaning there's a current of excitement.
Kabir Sehgal
#81. Memory is an act of meaning-making. It collects the disparate pieces of our lives and distills them.
Rebecca McClanahan
#82. Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
Walter Kaufmann
#83. We cannot live without meaning, that would preclude any sense of identity, any hope, any future.
Carlina Rinaldi
#84. My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises
Terence McKenna
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