Quotes about Meaning

Embracing joy heals depression. Then we become the ones who teach the meaning of joy to our children, as well as allowing them to teach it to us.

Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing.

Job learned about the vanity of this world by losing it all; the Teacher {Qoheleth} saw it by having it all. (The Message of the Old Testament, p. 536)

Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous." (VII)

Again, it is for the sake of the soul that goods external and goods of the body are eligible at all, and all wise men ought to choose them for the sake of the soul, and not the soul for the sake of them.

If, then, 'substance' is not attributed to anything, but other things are attributed to it, how does 'substance' mean what is rather than what is not?

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Our first presupposition must be that in nature nothing acts on, or is acted on by, any other thing at random, nor may anything come from anything else, unless we mean that it does so in virtue of a concomitant attribute.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason is the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being, whatever his age may be.