Quotes about Meaning

Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them; but the most human of all human needs—the need to see a meaning in one's life—remains unsatisfied. People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it — that's not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…

Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, Take it. This is my life.

There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love

For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out … the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning …

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said — but what mattered if the meaning were plain?

But suppose Peter said to her, Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties? all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But

And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind's ear, "…quite enough for everybody at present," she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…