Quotes About Meaning Well

#1. Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

Samuel Gridley Howe

#2. Meaning well is a poor defense,

Isaac Asimov

#3. Doing well is a conservative idea; meaning well is a liberal idea

Dennis Prager

#4. In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well.

P.G. Wodehouse

#5. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

David Levithan

#6. Christmas has a certain universal appeal that gives it meaning well beyond a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but Christians have a special duty to experience its sacred and profound spiritual significance and non-Christians have a duty to treat the day with special respect.

Michael Josephson

#7. So what's the point of it all?"
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well it's a reasonable question," you persisted.

Andy Weir

#8. For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

James Russell Lowell

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.

Alice Oswald

#13. 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

#14. It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.

Ludwig Von Mises

#15. But listen well. In Tir na nOg, because there is no sorrow, there is no joy.
Do you hear the meaning of the seachain's song?

Alexandra Ripley

#16. In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science particularly, the most important and fruitful concepts are those to which it is impossible to attach a well-defined meaning.

Hans Kramers

#17. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

Basil Bunting

#18. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.

Joyce Carol Oates

#19. Boys are different from girls, but boys are also different from other boys, just as girls are different from other girls. Calling a book 'for boys' or 'for girls' is well-meaning, but to me, not terribly helpful.

Marie Lu

#20. God is not all that interested in your grammar. He is interested in the meaning of your grammar!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#21. The smallest pebble in the well of truth has its peculiar meaning, and will stand when man's best monuments have passed away.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

#22. Life is a great asset we must all endeavor to acquire, keep and daily maintain it well with all due diligence, for without life, all other assets have no real meaning to our lives.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#23. Not to let anyone convince you that your dream, your vision to be an entrepreneur is something that you shouldn't do. What often happens is that people who are well meaning, who really care for us are afraid for us and talk us out of it.

Cathy Hughes

#24. Well Buddhism, 'shmoodism', I didn't go to India looking for Buddhism. I was looking for truth, or God, or a better way of life or happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose. And a way to become peace in the world and not just fight for peace, as we had in the 60's.

Surya Das

#25. I will say that comic books are not the easiest things to translate to film, number one. Even the most well meaning of filmmakers find what's acceptable on the printed page is very difficult to bring to film.

Mark Hamill

#26. I have won important things for myself, but I'm going to destroy them, because I tell myself they have lost their meaning. I know that is not true. I know they are important, and that if I destroy them, I'll be destroying myself, as well.

Paulo Coelho

#27. Yes, that's what I meant to say. If this seems a bit circular to you, well, it is, but it has deep meaning.

Kip S. Thorne

#28. But it's your Oracle," I protested. "Can't you tell us what the prophecy means?"
Apollo sighed. "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.

Rick Riordan

#29. The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.

Sheridan Hay

#30. Life is more than great sex and a nice car."
"Well, yeah. But not a lot more.

Jennifer Crusie

#31. He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgement of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. 'Yes, I see what you mean,' he said often.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#32. Placing too much emphasis on a yes/no diagnosis, meaning you either have a disease or you don't, can lead even the most well-meaning physicians to miss underlying causes and early warning signs of illness.

Mark Hyman

#33. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.

David Sedaris

#34. It is well known that large numbers of poor people attribute their poverty to what they call the tyranny of capital; meaning thereby the unwillingness of the owners of capital to allow others to use it without security for its safe return and compensation for its use.

Frederic Bastiat

#35. If the church is the body of Christ [who was disguised in servant form], why would we think the world would be able to pick us out of a crowd of other well-meaning organizations?

Mark Galli

#36. The meaning of the directions in kata is not well understood, and frequently mistakes are made in the interpretation of kata movements. In extreme cases, it is sometimes heard that "this kata moves in 8 directions so it is designed for fighting 8 opponents" or some such nonsense.

Kenwa Mabuni

#37. Rather than the destination it is the journey that lends meaning to our lives, great Neelkanth. Being faithful to our path will lead to consequences, both good as well as bad. For that is the way of the universe.

Amish Tripathi

#38. The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.

Harper Lee

#39. It comes back to the same old question people are always asking me: 'When are you going to do a solo record?' Well, if I did, it would probably be similar to 'Baluchitherium,' meaning it would be Van Halen music - which I write anyway - but without singing.

Eddie Van Halen

#40. Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal.

Thomm Quackenbush

#41. I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.

George A. Romero

#42. With the abundance of toys available, a child's room (or the whole house) can be overtaken by Kid Stuff with just one Christmas or birthday and a small group of well-meaning relatives.

Dana White

#43. Why is it a good thing to understand this movie so well? Because it will help you live a good life. Absorbing the deep meaning of the Nicomachean Ethics will also help you live a good life, but Groundhog Day will do it with a lot less effort. 35.

Charles Murray

#44. The weal of the race, and the cause of humanity, here and now, are enough To give life meaning and death as well.

Edgar Lee Masters

#45. Values are principles and ideas that bring meaning to the seemingly mundane experience of life. A meaningful life that ultimately brings happiness and pride requires you to respond to temptations as well as challenges with honor, dignity, and courage.

Laura Schlessinger

#46. The well-meaning woman was in fact possessed by two devils--the one the stiff-necked devil of pride, the other the condescending devil of benevolence. She was kind, but she must have credit for it

George MacDonald

#47. To live, is to suffer. To survive, well, that's to find meaning in the suffer.

D.M.X.

#48. Memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

Colm Toibin

#49. One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.

Langston Hughes

#50. Well, there's no question that the law passed in 1996 was flawed. It deregulated the wholesale market, meaning the price that the utilities had to pay energy companies for power, but not the retail market.

Gray Davis

#51. Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

Roy Blount Jr.

#52. Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.

Chuck Palahniuk

#53. Think through the well-meaning motivations of both your Dictator and your Wild Child, until you really understand that within their limited perspectives they're doing their very best. Then offer them both kindness.

Martha N. Beck

#54. The meeting began well, meaning it had the potential for being short.

Tucker Elliot

#55. You are one with your skis and nature. This is something that develops not only the body but the soul as well, and it has a deeper meaning for a people than most of us perceive.

Fridtjof Nansen

#56. Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

Roberto Bolano

#57. Cripple crow say something for our grieving, where do we go once we start leaving. Well close that wound or else keep on bleeding and change your tune, it's got no meaning.

Devendra Banhart

#58. Every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.

Freya Stark

#59. The greatest dangers to liberty," said Mr. Brandeis, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

E.B. White

#60. For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

Orhan Pamuk

#61. Reporting concepts as well as the relationships between concepts and other semantic meaning.

Anonymous

#62. At one point I suggested he go to a well-regarded waxing parlor in town for what they indelicately call the "sack, back, and crack." He struggled to absorb the full meaning of this, but after a few seconds he smiled a nervous smile and said, "In for a penny ...

Christopher Hitchens

#63. Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#64. Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here.

James Hillman

#65. For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

David Foster Wallace

#66. Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up.

George Saunders

#67. Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

Esther Dyson

#68. 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

#69. Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

Kurt Vonnegut

#70. I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

Karen Thompson Walker

#71. You know, the one with all the well meaning rules that don't work out in real life, uh, Christianity.

Homer

#72. As the valley gives height to the mountain, so can sorrow give meaning to pleasure; as the well is the source of the fountain, deep adversity can be a treasure.

William Arthur Ward

#73. Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

Francis Spufford

#74. Some people think they can just decree that everything will be fine. The world doesn't work like that. I'm not sure the world gives a crap about anyone's promises, well-meaning or otherwise. Sometimes the Universe just takes what it wants.

Paula Stokes

#75. School boards are, for the most part,made up of political wannabes who see a board seat as a stepping stone for political office, or well-meaning parents who represent an ethnic group or geography, or have some other narrow interests. Few people on them understand what governance is about.

Eli Broad

#76. The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

Elan Mastai

#77. well-meaning Christians almost killed the faith eight hundred years ago

Jon M. Sweeney

#78. What volunteers bring is the human touch, the individual, caring approach that no government program, however well-meaning and well- executed, can deliver.

Edward James Olmos

#79. After all, if you're going to kick authority in the teeth, it helps to have a manic smile on your face and a middle finger outstretched. Or, at the very least, armed with an ironic turn of phrase. Just ask any well meaning punk. Or Bob Dylan.

Unknown

#80. No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.

Krishna Udayasankar

#81. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

Charles Dickens

#82. Nothing has yet been offered to invalidate the doctrine that the meaning of the Constitution may as well be ascertained by the Legislative as by the Judicial authority.

James Madison

#83. These are my friends, my family. It would be hell on earth to spend the rest of my life leading them into situations where some of them are going to get killed ... but it would be worse watching someone well-meaning but incompetent or untrained double those deaths.

Mercedes Lackey

#84. It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.

Jacques Maritain

#85. What one wishes is to be touched by truth and to be able to interpret that truth so that one may use what one is feeling and experiencing, be it despair or joy, in a way that will add meaning to one's life and will hopefully touch others as well.

Michael Jackson

#86. It's like I have a sensor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay ... well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn't- say-out-loud-but-I-just-did.

Jenny Lawson

#87. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

Anthony Storr

#88. A people and their religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be necessary good for the well-being of the people.

B.R. Ambedkar

#89. The Kingdom of Heaven is not for the well-meaning: it is for the desperate.

James Denney

#90. I have never had a goal, I have sought out no result. I think that there cannot be, in general just as well as for ourselves, neither goal nor result. Everything isn't without meaning - the word slightly puts me off- but without necessity.

Emil Cioran

#91. Both, the thoughts as well as the senses, were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them,

Hermann Hesse

#92. Unfortunately, the boards of art institutions tend to be populated with well-meaning supporters of the arts who often lack any business background or appetite for imposing appropriate discipline.

Eli Broad

#93. So often, well-meaning Christians pray for a visitation from God, but what He really wants is a habitation with us. He doesn't want to come into our lives as a guest while we are on our best behavior around Him until He leaves.

Jack Frost

#94. But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning. Abel knew Pessoa's poetry well.

Jose Saramago

#95. Every thoughtful, well-meaning and conscientious human being
should assume in time of peace,
the solemn and unconditional obligation
not to participate in any war, for any reason
or to lend support of any kind, whether direct or indirect.

Albert Einstein

#96. When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity - called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called "inner" or "true" happiness.

Daniel J. Siegel

#97. At the moment I'm so exhausted that I feel like cutting my throat, so the next news masy well be that I am across the river and under the trees: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Death.

Delmore Schwartz

#98. Oh, Barley. You know me so well. Better than any cat ever has. But there is a secret that I have kept from you without meaning to: I have always been a warrior. I have a loyalty to these cats, and I must fight alongside them, whatever happens.

Erin Hunter

#99. One of those largish US women writers on the metaphysics of shagging had declared, as if it were a revelation - and a terrible one - that the sex act inevitably entailed violence on the female. Well, of course it did, you well-meaning, trite, benighted duck.

Bill James

#100. 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