Quotes About Meaning Alone

#1. Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.

Paul Valery

#2. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

T. S. Eliot

#3. Magic consists of creating, by misdirection of the senses, the mental impression of supernatural agency at work. That, and only that, is what modern magic really is, and that meaning alone is now assignable to the term.

John Nevil Maskelyne

#4. To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

Wallace Stevens

#5. She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

Dan Simmons

#6. It's like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot. One

Margaret Atwood

#7. Of course, we need stories. There's a reason "42" is not a satisfying answer to life, the universe, and everything. Structure alone doesn't quench our existential thirst. We want meaning. And for our brains, meaning comes in the form of stories.

Amanda Gefter

#8. A man is not defined by one allegiance alone... If he were, then reason would have no value, nor would loyalty have meaning.

Krishna Udayasankar

#9. Words alone mean nothing, because they can do nothing.

Marty Rubin

#10. Only in the moments of being alone in the darkness on the raft, will you have the space to speak, listen, and to act from the heart. Only in the moments of pain, do we begin to empathize with humankind. Only when you are lost, you will find new meaning. Float on.

Forrest Curran

#11. O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.

Thomas Merton

#12. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Jacques Monod

#13. The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

Logan Pearsall Smith

#14. Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

Thomas Merton

#15. God desires that man should be. God does not wish to be alone. The meaning of existence is the conquest of loneliness, the acquisition of kinship and nearness.

Nikolai A. Berdyaev

#16. By sharing something, I realized that I'm not alone, that there are a lot of people that share with me the same preoccupations, the same ideas, the same ideals, and the same quest for a meaning for this life.

Paulo Coelho

#17. Some one has defined a work of art as a "thing beautifully done." I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word "done," and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.

Robert Henri

#18. Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence.

Stefan Zweig

#19. We know that real life is "eucharist," a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and the value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled.

Alexander Schmemann

#20. Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom

Simone De Beauvoir

#21. It doesn't mean anything;
It doesn't change anything,
Except the way I see myself,
And it's not supposed to do that.
I shouldn't feel this way;
I should cry this way,
But I kind of do.
Yeah, I kind of do.

Margo T. Rose

#22. In Christ alone, and His payment of the penalty for our sins upon the Cross, we find reconciliation to God and ultimate meaning and purpose.

Dave Hunt

#23. Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

#24. Christ is the glory we were made to see. His light alone will fill us and give the light of life and meaning to every part of our lives. And

John Piper

#25. Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.

Yuval Noah Harari

#26. Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

Jerry Saltz

#27. Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

Helen Macdonald

#28. By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.

Leo Tolstoy

#29. Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.

Alice Borchardt

#30. It is better to be alone then to be in a relationship, while you are trying to figure out what love means to you.

Shannon L. Alder

#31. An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning.

Pope John Paul II

#32. Man alone, it seems, lives all his life in the knowledge of death. And yet there is more to life than merely waiting for death. For life to have meaning, there must be a purpose. A man must pass something on - otherwise he is useless. "For most men that purpose revolves around marriage and children

David Gemmell

#33. Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

Susan Sontag

#34. To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever.

Carolyn Ives Gilman

#35. Alone among the animals, humans seek meaning in their lives by killing and dying for the sake of nonsensical dreams.

John N. Gray

#36. 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

#37. Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Tom Stoppard

#38. Myths remind us of the symbolic presence within all the lost-and-found adventures that alone can give life meaning. Losing touch with the world of myth means losing the sense that life is deeply meaningful, full of meanings trying to be revealed at each twist and turn in the ongoing drama.

Michael Meade

#39. I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

Fernando Pessoa

#40. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery.

Kurt Vonnegut

#41. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.

Dalai Lama XIV

#42. When we touched ... it all clicked into place. He was my soul mate; I could feel it when he was near. Our bodies together made sense; our lives on a whole had new meaning. We were no longer condemned to walk alone like the undead.

K.I. Lynn

#43. It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that's consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#44. As for me, to love you alone, to make you happy, to do nothing which would contradict your wishes, this is my destiny and the meaning of my life.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#45. Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

Virginia Woolf

#46. The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

Edward Hirsch

#47. Ideas more than once have prevailed against naked power. Guns and aircraft alone do not make a state powerful. Unless force is backed up by the will of the great body of people it loses its meaning.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#48. A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.

Joan Didion

#49. We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

David Foster Wallace

#50. Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.

Viktor E. Frankl

#51. She has no body as others have. People have no meaning to her. She has no answer for them. Her mind steps into emptiness, alone.

Virginia Woolf

#52. Humans alone of all living creatures can reject the law of the jungle and create a code of conduct based on empathy and directed at discovering the meaning of life.

Devdutt Pattanaik

#53. Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'

Cesare Lombroso

#54. It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.

Max Lerner

#55. It is those moral and spiritual qualities which rise alone in free men, which will fulfill the meaning of the word American. And with them will come centuries of further greatness to our country.

Herbert Hoover

#56. But foreign should not be defined in geographical terms. Then it would have no meaning except territorial or tribal patriotism. To me that alone is foreign which is foreign to truth, foreign to Atman.

Ram Swarup

#57. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

Tom Stoppard

#58. I'll come back to you," he whispered, not meaning to say it out loud. "And I will ravish you over breakfast, and I will never leave you alone another night of my life.

Charlotte Featherstone

#59. I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Thor Heyerdahl

#60. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will.

John Ortberg

#61. You are alone,
So alone,
You speak back to silence.
People call it loneliness,
You call it solitude,
Different words,
Meaning the same pain.

Jenim Dibie

#62. More than death, one fears the utter isolation that accompanies it. We try to go through life two by two, but each one of us must die alone- no one can die our death with us or for us. The shunning of the dying by the living prefigures final absolute abandonment

Irvin D. Yalom

#63. As we admit our inadequacy to run the race alone and accept God's gracious redemption, then the race begins to have meaning, validity, and most of all, freedom.

Cynthia Heald

#64. She talked that night of all those out in the dark (she was thinking of Esteban alone, she was thinking of Pepita alone) who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning.

Thornton Wilder

#65. No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence
that which makes its truth, its meaning
its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream
alone.

Joseph Conrad