Top 100 What Is The Meaning 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. Spiritual seekers particularly are on a quest to understand life; we want to examine our own lives and find meaning in what we do and who we are ... We find meaning in the seeking itself. Every step along the way is the Way ...
Surya Das
#7. When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. is not the time you spend with someone, it is what happens in that time. I have known people for years, and yet never met the real person inside, if there is one. Others I have spoken with for only an hour or two, and yet what was said had meaning and honesty that will last forever.
Anne Perry
#13. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
#14. I create lies for people in order for them to find something true about themselves. I teach people that lies are doors that opens up to truth. Either you accept the lie, or you run away from it, thus, eliminating the meaning behind it, and what is could have accomplished.
Lionel Suggs
#15. 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
#16. Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.
Muriel Barbery
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Why in the world have we never found what we're really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won't accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
Pablo Picasso
#24. You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere (Maeve Brennan)
Elizabeth Winder
#25. The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.
A.J. Darkholme
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Good God! Willloughby, what is the meaning of this? -Marianne Dashwood
Jane Austen
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Who says we don't want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it's some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don't we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?
Dave Eggers
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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.
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. The question is not to know what is the meaning of life, but what meaning I can give to my life.
Dalai Lama
#50. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?
C. Wright Mills
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy.
Haruki Murakami
#63. 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
#64. Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to "our mistake." Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning. What did you say?
Claudia Rankine
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
Roland Barthes
#69. What is the meaning of life?Whatever you want it to be.
James Frey
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. We all want merit to mean something, and we all may be tempted to reduce that meaning to something measurable and concrete like an SAT score. The reality, though, is that who deserves entry into an institution depends on what the institution exists to do.
Eric Liu
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
#76. 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
#77. Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it has had.
Milan Kundera
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. A good teacher does not get lost in the details, but points to what is essential so that the child or student can find meaning and joy in life.
Pope Francis
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Things don't have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
Alberto Caeiro
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. If only your ears were not so formless, so clogged with meaning(s), that they are closed to what does not in some way echo the already heard" (p. 113, The Sex Which is Not One)
Irigaray, Luce
#92. Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.
Aaron Copland
#93. What gives moments meaning is not the moments themselves but the presence of Christ with us in the midst of them.
Emily P. Freeman
#94. 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
#95. Let's only care about the place where we are.
There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.
If there's someone beyond the curve in the road,
Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road,
That's what the road is to them.
Alberto Caeiro
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. [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
#99. 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
#100. That's just the way I end up making meaning from the direct material in my life - I think what makes it accessible is the desire to communicate, more than anything. It does make it accessible, but that's not what motivates me.
Frances Stark
