Quotes about Meaning

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.

It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.

Art isn't meaningless. - It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. - In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand peopled with ghosts. - Give a good show anyhow. - On the contrary, I'd feel, it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?

Books mean more than people to me anyway.

It is the living significance of the death of Jesus, not the factual details concerning it as a historical event, that matters.

Oh villain! Thou art condemned into everlasting redemption. Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.

Conservatism is not about the party, because the party is merely the shell. It is the inside - it's the filling that really means something.

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

Inner-life questions are the kind everyone asks, with or without benefit of God-talk: 'Does my life have meaning and purpose?' 'Do I have gifts that the world wants and needs?' 'Whom and what shall I serve?' 'Whom and what can I trust?' 'How can I rise above my fears?'

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.