Quotes About The Meaning Of Things

#1. The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.

Aristotle.

#2. I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

Ray Bradbury

#3. We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#4. I crave the indulgence of my senses but this is countered by an interior desire that is even keener than my senses to know the meaning of things

Errol Flynn

#5. I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

Frantz Fanon

#6. I was also partying a lot, and when you party that much, you feel irrelevant to the meaning of things; things hit you with a very sick center. And 9/11 is no exception to that. I really wondered: "How could anything go on?"

Carlos Dengler

#7. I don't talk things, sir,' said Faber. 'I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive.

Ray Bradbury

#8. The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

Ralph Ellison

#12. 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

#13. We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us
its size, motion and meaning.

Nawal El Saadawi

#14. There are some things about God that, were I to stop believing them, my world would change color, my hope would turn sour, and the meaning of my life would be yanked inside out.

Lewis B. Smedes

#15. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.

Bill Nye

#16. A gift isn't a gift unless it has meaning. Just giving things to people, especially children, create the expectation of more things.

Oprah Winfrey

#17. The purpose of life is to live. The meaning of life is whatever you choose. The secret to life is balance in all things ...

James A. Murphy

#18. One of my favorite things is when I'm listening to a song and I find my own meaning in it that I can relate to and I can create my own relationship and bond with the song.

Ed Droste

#19. Both the thoughts and the senses were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them ... from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived.

Hermann Hesse

#20. 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

#21. I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

Laurence Fishburne

#22. 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

#23. And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, 'This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I'm going to go hide in the garage.'

Anne Lamott

#24. 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

#25. The root meaning of phobo, the Greek term for fear, is "flight." That's the nature of fear. Fear causes us to run away from things that frighten us. And fear becomes sinful when it causes us to run away from the things God has commanded us to do. In

Wayne A. Mack

#26. There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time.

Tom Holt

#27. Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing.

Stanley Spencer

#28. Colors add meaning to life,
Some hidden facts they do imbibe.
One color could signify two things,
The onus lies on us,
As to how we take it.

Garima Jain

#29. The thing about me that seems to puzzle people the most - people who know me, who believe what i tell them - is that I can write the most profound things without actually meaning them.
I can persuade people of things I don't believe myself,or (more usually) simply don't care about

K.J. Parker

#30. When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of weekend dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens.

Pope John Paul II

#31. Education is an adventurous quest for the meaning of life, involving an ability to think things through.
Z. Applewhite.

Stephanie S. Tolan

#32. If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.

Chloe Thurlow

#33. Why should people be expected to think about the meaning of life merely because they happen to be ill? That is just the time when there is no time to think about such things, because the body is so greedy for attention.

Ferdinand Mount

#34. We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity ...

Eleanor Roosevelt

#35. Before seeking the true value of things, you must first define its true meaning.

Adele Mandez

#36. The purpose of existence is the education of the will. And the meaning of life is to learn to love the right things.

Brandon Mull

#37. I think it is easier to do bad things than to do good things. And there is something in that basic fact, some little clue to the meaning of the universe.

Donald Miller

#38. To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life.

Paulo Coelho

#39. The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.

Joseph Conrad

#40. The company of true friends, the taste of good food, the blossoms in spring, all the ordinary things that make the texture and meaning of life

Alison Croggon

#41. The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything is has to face without wavering. If we take this view, life becomes one great romance, a glorious opportunity for seeing marvelous things all the time.
God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.

Oswald Chambers

#42. Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

Alberto Caeiro

#43. The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.

N. Scott Momaday

#44. Living a comfortable life can allow you the psychic space needed to focus on other, often bigger, things and when you treat your possessions as emblems of your hard work, they inherit a meaning that transcends the objects themselves.

Sophia Amoruso

#45. But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God.

H.R. Rookmaaker

#46. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Haruki Murakami

#47. Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.

Frances Wright

#48. The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.

Erwin McManus

#49. 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

#50. Suddenly she bent down and kissed his fingers and went quickly away. But he sat for a long time in the gathering clouds trembling with happiness and trying to penetrate into the meaning of these things.

Thorton Wilder

#51. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.

Hussein Chalayan

#52. Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#53. Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Douglas Kennedy

#54. What silly little things sometimes take on meaning in life, suddenly, out of nowhere. And you know they're little nothings, and you laugh at them, but all the same, you go on feeling them, you can't stop ...

Sarah Ruhl

#55. I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

Frantz Fanon

#56. When you give meaning to even the most meaningless of things around you, you will always stand to be taught something new, have what you already know reinforced, or be reminded of what you've forgotten.

A.J. Darkholme

#57. Nothing lasts forever. Everything is fleeting. And yet, that's the very reason that life has meaning. When things cost effort to gain and are finite they are of value.

Sarah Noffke

#58. The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#59. Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, "Form is emptiness." That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, "Emptiness is form." One should not think that these are two seperate things.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo

#60. In a world where the only evidence of your existence was a body subject to decay and the works you left behind when the body was gone, you tried all manner of things to convince yourself that your life had some meaning, some permanence.

Traci Chee

#61. What it's like to be a parent: It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.

Nicholas Sparks

#62. The best things in life make you sweaty.

Edgar Allan Poe

#63. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.

Aldous Huxley

#64. I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.

Evan Parker

#65. The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.

Luther Standing Bear

#66. People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don't happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.

Jodi Picoult

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

Hermann Hesse

#68. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. We don't know the meaning of all things, but we know God loves His children! And because He loves us, He will never desert us.

John Bytheway

#69. We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#70. There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.

Joseph Campbell

#71. It's a matter of reducing the work to its very simplest possible state, eliminating all of the things that lead away from the guts of the work, the thing the work is really about. Anything that's there must build towards its over-all organization and meaning.

Paul Cullen

#72. My dear girl, you must cultivate a taste for the finer things. Civilized pleasures give meaning to life.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

#73. Ordinary people who live their lives peacefully, whose days gently resemble each other, may happen one day to stop and wonder why and what for do they do the things they do and have been doing for so many years?

Haim Shapira

#74. Both thought and the senses were fine things, behind both of them lay hidden the last meaning; it was worth while listening to them both, to play with both, neither to despise nor overrate either of them, but to listen intently to both voices.

Hermann Hesse

#75. Education that consists in learning things and not the meaning of them is feeding upon the husks and not the corn

Mark Twain

#76. The problem with words is that they easily lose their meaning. Say something often enough and it becomes a tic, not an expression of how you actually feel. Not only that, but words rarely change things. Actions do.

Seth Godin

#77. Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we with our capacity to love that fives meaning to the indifferent universe, and yet most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy from simple things.

Woody Allen

#78. A foolish mind would not raise an eyebrow when things are done diff erently in a foreign culture. An educated mind would try to understand the meaning of it all.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

#79. To my own demise, I rarely ask why I'm hungry because I'm focusing all of my energies on getting fed. And if I persist in such a diminishing cycle, in all probability I will eventually starve to death because I have chosen to gorge myself on the very things that will keep me empty.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#80. Two came here, Two flew off, - Butterflies. Chora3 In this verse, the ordinary poetical meaning is discarded; what remains is that dark flame of life that burns in all things. It is seen with the belly, not with the eye; with "bowels of compassion.

R.H. Blyth

#81. We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.

Diogenes Laertius

#82. The meaning that i am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things and life.

Luigi Ghirri

#83. Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Jim Woodring

#84. We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.

Steven Pinker

#85. Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells.

Michel Foucault

#86. Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature

Niels Bohr

#87. 'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Michael Sheen

#88. The theory of meaning says that joining and serving in things larger than you that you believe in while using your highest strengths is a recipe for meaning.

Joel Garreau

#89. Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own.

Helen Oyeyemi

#90. For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the "big picture" and discern the "grand story" of all things, so that the snapshots and stories of his own life could assume a deeper meaning.

Alister E. McGrath

#91. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Carl Jung

#92. One of the things I find most exciting is talking with people who are working with my work. Who are using it in some way with their life to address everyday politics of meaning.

Bell Hooks

#93. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things ... Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of man.

Thucydides

#94. From man's blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What's the meaning of all song?
Let all things pass away.

W.B.Yeats

#95. As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students' heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world's riddles settled into the palm of your hand like a tender oyster.

Haruki Murakami

#96. We want to think that there's an inviolable continuity among old friends, a bond that cannot be fissured despite years of lassitude and neglect. We want to believe that there's truth and solace in our memories, that there's meaning and purpose to the things that have happened to us.

Don Lee

#97. 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

#98. In the depths of the human soul ... the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things.

Pope John Paul II

#99. I never liked the idea of giving interviews. One says many things, but when they are published, they become shortened, condensed. The ideas lose their meaning.

Raul Castro

#100. The meaning of "He will give us all things" can be put thus: one day we will see that nothing - literally nothing - which could have increased our eternal happiness has been denied us, and that nothing - literally nothing - that could have reduced that happiness has been left with us.

J.I. Packer