The Meaning Of It All Quotes

#1. What is the meaning of it all, of this ... of this world?
'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, 'mercy', but I wasn't certain of either.

Orhan Pamuk

#2. You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

Aleksandar Hemon

#3. When one begins to purposefully perform acts of kindness, the spirit changes and soon doing good deeds becomes a focal point for our life; doing good begins to be the same as feeling good. The periods of emptiness when we search for the "meaning of it all" begin to fill with acts of kindness.

Gary Blair

#4. 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

#5. While it may be disappointing, I have to confess to people who ask for my insights on the meaning of it all that astronomy doesn't provide any clearly useful data on matters of sin and souls.

Seth Shostak

#6. God has left that for the rest of time and eternity in order to give us something to do in the hereafter. We'll be able to learn more about the past and why things happened, as well as God's logic and purposes and the meaning of it all.

David Berg

#7. Dying is as natural as being born, and all of us have to face it someday. Some sooner than others. It's difficult to understand the meaning of it all. The question isn't, 'Why do we die?' The correct question is, 'Why do we live?

S.M. Reine

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.

Stephen Sondheim

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. I was only one person among many. None of us made a difference individually, but together we all did." It was the true meaning of community.

Danielle Steel

#17. The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which, once realised, makes all movements full of meaning and joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

#18. Many find in sex and economics the meaning of life and the reason of it all. The consequence of this is that the goal of life for many has become a relief of tension.

Sachindra Kumar Majumdar

#19. I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.

Percival Everett

#20. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

Ann Brashares

#21. What the end of the carnage of World War II meant to those who remember it, can never be forgotten, but to all those who don't, its meaning can never be fully understood!

Calvin Coolidge

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

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#23. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Iris Murdoch

#24. As Gazzaniga put it, these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.

David Eagleman

#25. We have the truth still with us. But it is not found in books, to any given extent. It has been passed along......from lip to ear. When it was written down at all, its meaning was veiled in terms of alchemy and astrology, so that only those possessing the key could read it aright.

Three Initiates

#26. We're raising our girls to understand the real meaning of Christmas, and to know that it's most important to have Christmas in your heart. We go to our local mall and donate toys, and we say prayers for all the people in the world who might not be as lucky as we are.

Faith Hill

#27. How do they manage to go on living? ... By loving life. And-in spite of everything-by loving God. By having enough faith to start over again and again; enough faith to risk having our hearts break all over again. That's the true meaning of faith. It's the deepest kind of heroism.

Naomi Ragen

#28. 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

#29. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.

H.G.Wells

#30. In college, I became interested in folk tales and fairy tales. Gradually I became more and more interested in the underlying meaning of it all and the possibility of the reality of real fairies.

Brian Froud

#31. But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.

David Levithan

#32. All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

William Gibson

#33. 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

#34. It's all you can say, when the end comes: 'I did not waste my time.' I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.

Conn Iggulden

#35. I think the sense of community that exists with all the characters - that's the answer. The fact that they have found a family in their friends. It does give some depth and meaning to their lives.

Randy Harrison

#36. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#37. If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?

Lauren B. Davis

#38. Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism.

Caroline Emelia Stephen

#39. While it wasn't a total given that all members of the Color Guard also belonged to the Chastity Club, twirling flags was considered one of the most wholesome activities on campus, meaning the ratio of Chastity girls in Color Guard was something like that of Mormons in Utah.

Gemma Halliday

#40. It was only that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness.

Anne Rice

#41. All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

Tom Waits

#42. All heaven is interested in the cross of Christ, all hell terribly afraid of it, while men are the only beings who more or less ignore its meaning.

Oswald Chambers

#43. I did, of course, on both counts, and started going out with the boy I lost my virginity to - all of it. He lost his to me too, except that neither of us felt we had lost anything - just discovered the meaning of life and love and everything else unnecessary in between.

Elly Varrenti

#44. We are travellers in each other's lives, carried down the paths of time, touching here and there in strange moments of intimacy. And the intersections, where the paths meet, give meaning to it all, mark the paths with light and shade.

Jenny M. Jones

#45. A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

Stanley Kubrick

#46. In the search for reality, energy creates its own discipline. But mere discipline, without full comprehension of all this, has no meaning, it is a most destructive thing.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#47. only because language has something in common with the world that it can be used to picture the world, so it is only because of logic that our sentences have meaning at all.

Dan Cryan

#48. I think all the characters in 'American Horror Story,' which is why I love it, are looking for some sense of meaning, and also it's their form of happiness.

Denis O'Hare

#49. She had stumbled on what was possibly the ultimate truth, the greatest wisdom of all - the search for knowledge never ends. It goes on and on forever.

Michael Oehley

#50. 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

#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. What is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of happiness.

Aristotle.

#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. Life and all that is in it
is a gift from the infinite mind;
And the only way that life can go wrong
is by the limited finite mind.

Eric Foley Saucier

#55. Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning - We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.

Joy Harjo

#56. but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!' The

Leo Tolstoy

#57. On Philosophy:
It's the search for meaning that has value, not the meaning itself.
All problems are solvable if a problem is a question that can't be shown not to have a solution.
To those with burning passion, follow it; to those of lessor passion, fill a need.

Kalifer Deil

#58. 'Winnie The Witch' transgresses all cultural boundaries. Amusingly, there have been attempts to deconstruct the meaning of the books - that Winnie represents society and Wilbur the disabled - but I think it's just a great story.

Korky Paul

#59. Simmy entertained slippery thoughts about identity and the meaning of any individual's span on earth. When it came right down to it, she supposed that all a person really amounted to was the sum of their memories.

Rebecca Tope

#60. This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis ... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

William Robertson Smith

#61. If I ask you to plunge into the Ganga or to jump from the roof of a house, meaning it all for your good, could you do even that without any hesitations Just think of it even now; otherwise don't rush forward on the spur of the moment to accept me as your Guru.

Swami Vivekananda

#62. Love and belonging are irreducible needs of all men, women, and children. We're hardwired for connection - it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging, and connection always leads to suffering.

Brene Brown

#63. The girl danced like light on water. After I'd watched for a while I looked with all of me, not just my eyes, and then I saw the meaning of the dance. I wanted to stop looking because it was so sad, but I couldn't because it was so beautiful.

Glenda Millard

#64. Fear never leaves you. It just adapts to you. And that's the meaning of strengthening a warrior spirit from within, as you can't fight all your battles with the same weapons.

Bryan Keyleader

#65. When Logic congeals into all-encompassing and perfect-seeming theories, then it can actually become a very evil con trick. Wittgenstein has a point, you see: 'All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning!

Apostolos Doxiadis

#66. I begin, then, with some remarks about 'the meaning of a word.' I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but not all do, and there is a tendency to forget, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.

J.L. Austin

#67. A tear that trembles for a little while
Upon the trembling eyelid, till the world
Wavers within its circle like a dream,
Holds more of meaning in its narrow orb
Than all the distant landscape that it blurs.

Henry Van Dyke

#68. Because I had goodwill for all, I thought all were my friends, and then I learned of treachery, that some preferred my end. A glorious day, the one I learned the meaning of the word. It's good to know my enemies, though their reasons are absurd.

Vanna Bonta

#69. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

David Bohm

#70. 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

#71. And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.

Milan Kundera

#72. The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery.

Eugene Wigner

#73. We all go through life as puzzled monkeys. The minute we think we're any more than that, we've made a grave mistake. We're just trying to gain some meaning of it all, some understanding. The only thing we can do is buy the ticket, take the ride. And offer our barbaric yawps to the world...

Nate Jordon

#74. No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It's just one damn thing after another.

Stanley Hauerwas

#75. The human being of all times prays because he cannot fail to wonder about the meaning of his life, which remains obscure and discomforting of it is not put in relations to the mystery of God and if his plan for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

#76. The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them, is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest. We carry within us a divine spark, and if we chose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope.

Dean Koontz

#77. 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

#78. So I watch her work and put all her energy, all her force, all herself, all is inside her work. Does she think that this is what life means? She goes to work in the dark and comes home when it's dark. Does she know what the world looks like when the sun is shining?

Jinat Rehana Begum

#79. That's how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously. (p.175)

Yuval Noah Harari

#80. But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. If the dreamlike visions were stripped of all pretense of order and meaning, then they could safely ignore them. According to the rules: "If I do not remember it, it means, it was not worth remembering." In the jargon of the dreamers these dreams are called "lemons".

Andrzej Sapkowski

#85. But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way, even though I may die sooner because I did it; for I know the meaning of the vision is wise and beautiful and good; and you can see that I am only a pitiful old man after all.

Black Elk

#86. If life is to have meaning, and if God's will is to be done, all of us have to accept who we are and what we are, give it back to God, and thank Him for the way He made us. What I am is God's gift to me; what I do with it is my gift to Him.

Warren W. Wiersbe

#87. If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know," he went on [ ... ]; "I seem to see some meaning in them, after all.

Lewis Carroll

#88. It should have great meaning that of all the titles of respect and honor and admiration that could be given him, that God himself, he who is the highest of all, chose to be addressed simply as "Father."

A. Theodore Tuttle

#89. All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.

John Ruskin

#90. What is the meaning of Initiation? It is the Path to the realisation of your Self as the sole, the supreme, the absolute of all Truth, Beauty, Purity, Perfection!

Aleister Crowley

#91. It's impossible for me to think of music as a contest. All of the awards ceremonies, I mean I'm sure they're fun for people, but they have no meaning to me.

Greg Brown

#92. And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words ... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

Alan W. Watts

#93. Far more important than the tribulations and heartaches, the thrills, merriment, and pleasures of life is what you learn from it all. It isn't the tunnel we pass through that matters, it's what emerges on the other side.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#94. Since long ago all peoples have recognized that the world, apart from its physical meaning, also has a moral one. Yet everywhere the matter has only come to a vague consciousness, which, as it sought expression, clothed itself in all sorts of images and myths. There are religions.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#95. For all the glamour of living forever ... immortality is really just a long curse. Finite life is precious; it's fleeting and significant. But immortality ... immortality isn't living at all. It's a permanent existence void of meaning.

Chelsea Fine

#96. I lived through being pooh-poohed by fine art galleries, saying, "Digital is going to destroy the meaning behind photos." The motion side, the moment all of the cameras come alive with that motion, it was like a dream come true. It enables people to economically experiment with film.

Russell James

#97. Such is life, marked by the ticking of the clock and the call of the alarm until the day it all falls into perpetual silence. For most of us, certainly for this boy, life is not composed of great deeds, but of small actions, and that's okay. It's the best I can give and I like it this way.

Gillibran Brown

#98. It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.

Edward Sapir

#99. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.

George Orwell

#100. Thinking ... is a soundless dialogue, it is the weaving of patterns, it is a search for meaning. The activity of thought contributes to and shapes all that is specifically human.

Vera John-Steiner