Quotes about Meaning

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day

Believing there is no God does not make the thirst go away.

One of the most important things we can do for a suffering person is to restore a sense of meaning or significance to the experience.

Christianity offers the further insight that true fulfillment comes, not through ego satisfaction, but through service to others.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.

Viktor Frankl, who spent time in one of Hitler's camps, said, "Despair is suffering without meaning.

He had not come primarily to heal the world's cells, but to heal its souls.

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things . . . as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

by embracing grief and standing beside the hurting person, we can indeed aid another's search for meaning.

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

To ache so deeply now for Nana gave the older woman's life profound meaning. It was a privilege to mourn such a loss because it meant you had loved and been loved.

If there is no God, we know there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life: that all existence—including, of course, our own—is the result of random chance.