Top 100 Meaning To Quotes
#1. We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.
John Cage
#2. If my life had no meaning there was no reason not to end it.
Dan Wells
#3. Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#4. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.
Radka Donnell
#5. If time stood still for a moment, what would you be grateful for? And will it be enough to allow time to have meaning when it begins?
Steven Cuoco
#6. Indeed, eventually, random outcomes all revert to the mean, meaning that streaks eventually end. Understanding this is a key part of intelligent and rational investing.
Barry Ritholtz
#7. But it's not enough to just "discover" the meaning of life. What really matters is whether we live according to our values, and that takes hard work and a hundred hard choices every day.
Greg M. Epstein
#8. When you love people and have the desire to make a profound, positive impact upon the world, then will you have accomplished the meaning to live.
Sasha Azevedo
#9. There's no direction I can go in. If I met someone else, what meaning would there be left? If the pain goes, does that mean I never loved her? How can I get over it? I can't, I mustn't. But what else am I going to do?
Marie Phillips
#10. Despite the slowness, the infidelity, the errors and sins it committed and might still commit against its members, the Church, trust me, has no other meaning and goal but to live and witness Jesus.
Pope Francis
#11. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
Octavio Paz
#12. A title from the1966 movie
"The Russians Are Coming,
The Russians Are Coming,"
gives a new meaning to
a phrase: "wait a minute,
we've seen this movie before
Steven Ivy Attorney Entrepreneur
#13. Idealism, however impractical, gives a meaning to our existence.
Anirban Bose
#14. the ultimate meaning of words cannot be found in what the listener hears but in what he listens to upon hearing
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#15. It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
Gunter Grass
#16. Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.
Tony Robbins
#17. What you do every day should contribute to giving your life meaning. If it doesn't, why are you doing it?
Don Hutcheson
#18. Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words 'to father' have such a different meaning from the words 'to mother'.
Claire Fuller
#19. God, it's like reality's completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can't decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren't there for me anymore.
Tess Gerritsen
#20. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
Victor Davis Hanson
#21. Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.
Andrew Wyeth
#22. I discovered that the real meaning of Christmas has nothing to do with you at all. It is about a very special gift. I want to you tell you about this gift.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#23. For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.
Leo Tolstoy
#24. The moment one conceives the meaning of human greatness is the moment when one understands the baseness, the triviality and the meanness of the material from which we have to mould it.
Bill Hopkins
#25. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?
Thomas Merton
#26. 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
#27. They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'
As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.
Paulo Coelho
#28. My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
Charles Dickens
#29. A woman's belly is the garden of life. Her mind is the gateway to meaning. Her heart is the source of love. And her eyes are the light by which the whole world sees beauty.
Toni Sorenson
#30. The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.
Earl Warren
#31. The meaning of these discoveries has not yet been sorted out, but it is certainly now impossible to regard the prehistoric Europeans as savages idly
Michael Crichton
#32. I'm so fascinated by the human longing for meaning. The way we relate romantically to each other is so much to do with our longing for meaning as well.
Kimbra
#33. Spiritual seekers particularly are on a quest to understand life; we want to examine our own lives and find meaning in what we do and who we are ... We find meaning in the seeking itself. Every step along the way is the Way ...
Surya Das
#34. A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.
Jules Cashford
#35. People need meaning as much as they need air. Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.
Daniel H. Wilson
#36. So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice.
John Eldredge
#37. Catholic education aims not only to communicate facts but also to transmit a coherent, comprehensive vision of life, in the conviction that the truths contained in that vision liberate students in the most profound meaning of human freedom.
Pope John Paul II
#38. No one's life should be rooted in fear. We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.
Dean Koontz
#39. When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
#40. Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and
follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand
years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a
reason to live - to learn, to discover, to be free!
Richard Bach
#41. I hadn't grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, but so distended that they ended up by overlapping on each other. In fact, I never thought of days as such; only the words 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still kept some meaning.
Albert Camus
#42. When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.
George MacDonald
#43. Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.
Joseph Conrad
#44. If churches are to be healthy, then pastors and teachers must be committed to discovering the meaning of Scripture and allowing that meaning to drive the agenda with their congregations.
Thabiti M. Anyabwile
#45. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence - of talking without meaning - is never effaced.
Henry Adams
#46. The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Rabindranath Tagore
#47. It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest ...
Jan Morris
#48. To deal with someone from other infinites is problematic at times, to deal with a true master of all the realms of the yogas. We call them someone with the seven seals of enlightenment, meaning that their gradated perception has past through all the realms.
Frederick Lenz
#49. She'd felt like being nice cost her something, even if it was just feeling a little bit lesser, every time she smiled without meaning to.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#50. For indeed you have a choice. You can flee and hide, and wait to be found. You can live out your days in terror, without meaning. Or you can take the harder choice, and you can save them.
Juliet Marillier
#51. I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory.
John Adams
#52. We can only be enlightened to the meaning of wise words
only and only if life have put and made us requiring them.
Toba Beta
#53. The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.
Jim Corbett
#54. He continued to stroke its back and scratch its ears, but after a minute or two he realized he was seeking something from the dog that it could not provide: meaning, purpose, relief from despair.
Dean Koontz
#55. On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.
Albert Einstein
#56. Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning.
Mitt Romney
#57. If we focus on the minuses, we go down the spiral. But if we are able to focus on the pluses, we can become stronger and put more meaning into our life.
Petra Nemcova
#58. Sometimes we exist long enough to lead the next generation; other times, only to plant a seed and let its resonations of our time here on Earth ripple into new waves.
A.J. Darkholme
#59. Okay - the world needs its cogs, all of them; and even a cog may say how it gets used. In fact, only a cog may determine its eventual meaning in the system. That's what I wanted to tell you.
Keigo Higashino
#60. P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That's the human dashboard.
Martin Seligman
#61. How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself
the task of a lifetime
becomes the answer.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
#62. A guy's gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.
Libba Bray
#63. A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. - Froude's History of England, ch. i.
William Hurrell Mallock
#64. PRINCIPLE is likewise such a law for action, except that it has not the formal definite meaning, but is only the spirit and sense of law in order to leave the judgment more freedom of application when the diversity of the real world cannot be laid hold of under the definite form of a law.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#65. It is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.
Ludwig Von Mises
#66. Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.
Janelle Monae
#67. What is it you want your audience to see? Who is your audience? What does surface signify? Does it carry meaning? Do you fully understand and know what you are doing? WHY are you using encaustic?
Kay WalkingStick
#68. It's a supernatural library filled with unfinished ghost stories, written by ghosts, where time has no meaning , and the Boogeyman wants to blow it all up. What exactly is it you think I can handle about any of that ?
D.J. MacHale
#69. The meaning of the world, said Wittgenstein, is outside the world. Events and values are distinguishable only in relation to others. A totality of events and values, the world itself, requires another.
Guy Davenport
#70. There's a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.
Peter Senge
#71. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. - Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States (1928)
Jane Mayer
#72. 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
#73. You don't have to search so hard for meaning and destiny. If you focus on keeping yourself clear and in balance and you live from your heart, destiny and your highest-good path will unfold naturally at your feet.
Melody Beattie
#74. Comparing is empoverishing our own experience. There is meaning to our suffering, if we rise above it.
Paulo Coelho
#75. Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world.
Ernest L. Boyer
#76. The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
#77. Again Creb grunted. It was the usual noncommittal comment used by men when responding to a woman. It carried only enough meaning to indicate the woman had been understood, without acknowledging too much significance in what she said.
Jean M. Auel
#78. You say, "But He has not answered." He has, He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet, but presently you will.
Oswald Chambers
#79. What will you do with your self? Many men and women are still in darkness, trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. But no matter what you try to do with your self - whether you deny it, obliterate it, annihilate it, accept it or express it - believe me, it is still alive and kicking.
K.P. Yohannan
#80. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?
Mary Doria Russell
#81. A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing, But the man who lves that span, he is something ... 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.
Chaim Potok
#82. 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
#83. The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.
Leo Tolstoy
#84. Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation.
Bruce Sterling
#85. Goals give life substance. - To strive actively to achieve some goal gives your life meaning and substance.
Bruce Lee
#86. The companies that are successful, they start out to make meaning, not to make money.
Guy Kawasaki
#87. In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Thomas Merton
#88. Every time a child organizes and completes a chore, spends some time alone without feeling lonely, loses herself in play for an hour, or refuses to go along with her peers in some activity she feels is wrong, she will be building meaning and a sense of worth for herself and harmony in her family.
Barbara Coloroso
#89. No authentic Messiah would inspire a religion that ended up calling upon the Jews to reject the manifest meaning of Sinai. It is really that simple.
David Klinghoffer
#90. The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?
William Barrett
#91. Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
Joan D. Vinge
#92. Stories give color to black and white information.
Todd Stocker
#93. I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.
I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
Jeanette Winterson
#94. If you look and listen for it, you'll see and hear synchronistic clues from the Universe that go past everyone else but have special meaning for you, guiding you to make the best of things. Look for synchronistic "winks" from the Universe.
Bill Harvey
#95. I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them.
Pablo Picasso
#96. Those who survive are those who do not defy the gravity of others. And those who desire even a moment of freedom, find themselves hurled into space, doomed to crash with some unknown force. I no longer desire that freedom. I move, just move. Without meaning.
Mahesh Dattani
#97. Man does work for profit in order to enjoy pain; but in a positive sense, he works to enjoy the excitement and meaning that achievement provides for his own psychological growth and thereby his happiness.
Frederick Herzberg
#98. Once you get very clear about the things that are the most important to you in your life, those things that truly give meaning and purpose to your existence, purging and de-cluttering will become a natural process.
Cary David Richards
#99. The question is, do you have deliberate plans for your life? Do you have intentions with you time? God planned that there should be a time for everything and for every season, meaning you can plan for everything and every season in your life! You may ask, 'Is that possible?" I say, "It's up to you!
Archibald Marwizi
#100. Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
Rose Macaulay