Top 100 What Is The Meaning Of 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. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.

Joseph Bruchac

#11. I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye

#12. 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

#13. For me philosophy begins with these experiences of disappointment: a disappointment at the level of what I would think of as "meaning," namely that, given that there is no God, what is the meaning of life? And, given that we live in an unjust world, how are we to bring about justice?

Simon Critchley

#14. Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

J.L. Austin

#15. One day, my sweet girl, some lucky man will come and help you understand the very meaning of love. He will sweep you off your feet and show you what it is to place your heart in someone else's care to willingly offer them the gift of your soul.

Tillie Cole

#16. As Einstein said, God does not play dice with the universe; everything is interconnected and has a meaning. That meaning may remain hidden nearly all the time, but we always know we are close to our true mission on earth when what we are doing is touched with the energy of enthusiasm.

Paulo Coelho

#17. Non-possession does not mean having nothing. It does not mean to live as a penniless beggar. Rather than meaning having nothing, it is the idea of not possessing what we do not need. The more we possess, The more we have attachments.

Boep Joeng

#18. Poetry can bridge that gap between what is solid and what is suggested; poetry can pull cogent meaning from the veiled truths outside of reason's grasp.

Bryant McGill

#19. Good God! Willloughby, what is the meaning of this? -Marianne Dashwood

Jane Austen

#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. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

J.M. Coetzee

#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. Words have power.Their power doesn't merely emanate from the meaning they carry,but also hidden truth they leave behind.In what is left unsaid.

K.J. Kilton

#24. I long to see a radical shift in philanthropy that will come to characterize the 21st century. That is, a reclaiming of the root meaning of philanthropy: love of what it means to human.

Valaida Fullwood

#25. 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

#26. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB.

Neil Postman

#27. The chances of finding out what's really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.

Douglas Adams

#28. The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#29. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

Alvaro De Campos

#30. It is gorgeously shot, and Andrew believes that the old school way of making films in the best way. Meaning: you have a story, and you stick to the story. You don't change and alter the story because of people who've invested in it and what to put product in a shot.

Michael Berryman

#31. Man's Chief purpose ... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.

Lewis Mumford

#32. What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#33. To see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?

CrimethInc.

#34. Grammar is what gives sense to language ... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

David Crystal

#35. 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

#36. Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects.

David Levithan

#37. The question is not to know what is the meaning of life, but what meaning I can give to my life.

Dalai Lama

#38. I believe every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. Violence should not be answered just by greater violence but by real understanding. We must ask: 'Where is the violence coming from? What is its meaning?

Jean Vanier

#39. So what is the truth?" Mr Umezaki had once asked him. "How do you arrive at it? How do you unravel the meaning of something that doesn't want to be known?

Mitch Cullin

#40. 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

#41. Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

Jurgen Habermas

#42. Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?

C. Wright Mills

#43. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition.

Nicole Krauss

#44. We've established a Washington State Academy of Sciences that will enable us to make decisions based on science about what is right for our state, meaning the quality of our lives will get better.

Christine Gregoire

#45. Hope is life's essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.

Dick Van Dyke

#46. 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

#47. We do not ask life what the meaning of life is. Life asks us, what is the meaning of your life. And life demands our answer.

Viktor E. Frankl

#48. What is a Person? is a clear and comprehensive reconsideration of the meaning of human personhood as the central core of social structures. With breadth of intellect and balance of wisdom, Smith resets the frame of reflection for the most important discussions of the twenty-first century.

William B. Hurlbut

#49. What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself

Lewis Mumford

#50. What Alpha offers, and what is attracting thousands of people, is permission, rare in secular culture, to discuss the big questions - life and death and their meaning.

Madeleine Bunting

#51. Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing.

Erik Erikson

#52. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Edward Hirsch

#53. What is the meaning of life?Whatever you want it to be.

James Frey

#54. 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

#55. As we begin to transform, illness and pain can also be seen as a "messenger" for spiritual growth. What does this illness mean? What can I learn from this? Why is the occurring in my life

Teresa DeCicco

#56. 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

#57. A weak King must be what other Kings have been; a strong King is himself, and from then on the meaning of the name of King is changed.

Orson Scott Card

#58. 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

#59. The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it's being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.

Tod Machover

#60. People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive ... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. - JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Elizabeth Lesser

#61. That thing over there was more there than it's there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn't look very much,

Alberto Caeiro

#62. No matter how you really feel at the moment or what is happening in your life, resolve to remain cheerful and upbeat. As Viktor Frankl wrote in his bestselling book Man's Search for Meaning, The last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one's attitude in any given set of cricumstances.

Brian Tracy

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

Alberto Caeiro

#64. 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

#65. To communicate is truly a gift. It is a wondrous ability of your amazing human body, the ability that allows us to connect with other humans to give meaning to our lives. I will argue that it is what makes us human.

Kathleen Depperschmidt

#66. The older you get, I should think, the more you will come to understand that the universe is very much a looking glass, Miss Lancaster." "Meaning what, precisely?" "That it reflects a great deal more of yourself to your senses than you probably know.

Jim Butcher

#67. Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life ... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.

A.M. Homes

#68. What is the meaning to this life?" is a wrong question? A blank paper doesn't contain any meaning till we don't write anything meaningful on it. Similarly this universe doesn't contain any meaning without this beautiful life. So life gives meaning to this universe and we should respect it.

Brajesh Kumar

#69. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Viktor E. Frankl

#70. What we're searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#71. What gives moments meaning is not the moments themselves but the presence of Christ with us in the midst of them.

Emily P. Freeman

#72. Just imagine that the purpose of life is happinesss only-
then life becomes a cruel and senseless thing.You have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity,your intellect and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.Then life becomes a joy

Leo Tolstoy

#73. 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

#74. I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#75. [On husband Phil Donahue:] The man does not know the meaning of the word tidy. He asked me one day, 'Where are my shoes?' So I asked him, 'Where are my shoes?' I don't know what it is about men. They think that women have radar attached to our uteruses.

Marlo Thomas

#76. There is no door that leads to the meaning of existence, no window to enlightenment. If only we could enter life through the exit and live in reverse; then maybe we'd have a chance at understanding what the hell life is about.

Barbara Schoichet

#77. The word "identification" is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning "same" and facere, which means "to make." So when I identify with something, I "make it the same." The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my "identity.

Eckhart Tolle

#78. Life without God is ultimately life without any point of reference for meaning other than what one gives it at the time.

Ravi Zacharias

#79. The food which I get by begging is divine." After I had thought over what she said, I understood her meaning. When we get our food precariously as alms, we remember God the giver. But when we receive our food regularly at home, as a matter of course, we are apt to regard it as ours by right.

Rabindranath Tagore

#80. The novelist's
any writer's
object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

Elizabeth Bowen

#81. Everybody complains that politics separates words from their meanings, and this is part of the reason why. Words are useful, but often their meanings are not. Sometimes what you want is feeling rather than meaning, warmth rather than content. And that takes verbiage. The

Barton Swaim

#82. 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.

#83. 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

#84. What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.

Emil Brunner

#85. Sometimes I'd yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel - "What is the meaning of the void?" The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.

Jack Kerouac

#86. Oh, stop it, I tell myself. Stop looking for links and meaning and explanations. What did De Chirico say? The world is a museum of strangeness.

Kirsty Eagar

#87. What is more important to a library than anything else
than everything else
is the fact that it exists.
[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]

Archibald MacLeish

#88. I know some people say I can be funny. But there is always a deeper meaning to what I say. I am a socialist at heart and have the interests of the poor in mind. When people see how I manage to work my way out of tough situations, it gives them hope in their own life.

Lalu Prasad Yadav

#89. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Freya Stark

#90. I placed my hands on his chest and took a step away. "Sometimes I really don't like you."
"Key word to what you just said is sometimes, meaning not all the time, meaning most of the time you like me, and that's good enough for me.

Joddie Zeng

#91. What is the meaning of life? It is too great a phenomenon to fit into any meaning.

Jaggi Vasudev

#92. Whenever we suffer - no matter what the severity of our suffering is - we have the ability to find meaning in the situation.

Alex Pattakos

#93. It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job with the meaning of your life.

Sam Keen

#94. I'm not going to live my life unhappy and why should he and we talk about it and I think what's great about the film is that it shows is the meaning of family doesn't have to be as traditional as it once was, like you can make a family.

Nia Long

#95. 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

#96. I can't even think of the right word, but it's not "help." It's more like a prerequisite. I think connection is why we're here, it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and belonging is in our DNA. And so "tribe" and "belonging" are irreducible needs, like love.

Brene Brown

#97. It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

James Taylor

#98. He is of what is called the old school - a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young.

Charles Dickens

#99. Nothing goes perfectly for us. But ... being incomplete is what pushes us onward to the next something ... If we were even perfectly satisfied, what meaning would the rest of our lives hold, right?

Takehiko Inoue

#100. What are humans meant to do; why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning; what is the meaning of human existence?

David W. Earle

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