Meaningfulness Quotes

“It's a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a mater of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“I have never written a note I didn't mean.”
― Erik Satie

“Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need
for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty, and a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“He was not poor - he could afford ten candles & two baths a week. He wasn't going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“When you see people doing meaningless things, you must remind yourself that it is easier for people to do meaningless things than doing meaningful things!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born an the day you find out why.”
― Mark Twain

“The ability to talk to people: that’s the key to the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are able to articulate your own thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs. If you can talk to people in this way, you can go - you can get - anywhere in this world, in life.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“Hank: This is my one beautiful existence, and over the course of my life I will spend years of my life watching television; years of my life pooping; years of my life on twitter. How ok is that? [...]

One thing that I really want to get away from is the idea that time is wasted when you are not producing something. [...]

John: I do think that there might be some value in asking yourself: "What do I want to do while I'm here? What do I want to do with my time?"

And part of the answer for that should, I think, be: "I want to distract myself from the pain of meaninglessness.”
― John Green

“In it she wrote, of her depression, “That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“The lives we live are so much bigger than the bodies we inhabit.”
― Martin Bodek, Zaidy's War: Four Armies, Three Continents, Two Brothers. One Man's Impossible Story of Endurance

“Life is the one riddle that is denotative, referential. Although every person shares a common ultimate destiny, each person must work out their own life, script their own personal salvation, and wrestle with the fear and trembling that is inherent when we consider our mortality.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our times and our thoughts shape us. The world is in a constant and ceaseless state of motion and transformation. The only constant is that the universe we occupy today will undergo change based in part because of our personal actions and omissions and partially because the random volitions of the world’s flux are impervious to our meager intentions. We are more reactors than we are enactors of our daily shape testing experiences. Necessity demands that we interpret our physical environment and assign meaning to the mandala of experiences that resonate with our emotional cordage.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The song in our heart ultimately sustains us. Each of us possesses the ability to choose how we perceive life, determine what attitudes and viewpoint to endorse, and assign meaning to personal existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Hell is on earth. We create it. It isn't some faraway place that we get sent to once life is over, and we're being punished for all of our crimes, and indiscretions. Our crimes and indiscretions are the punishment. Anything that makes us feel shitty, and comes from a shitty place, and inevitably leads to the expansion of shitty-ness, is hell. Just as anything that gives us meaning, and comes from a meaningful place, and inevitably leads to the expansion of meaningfulness, is heaven.”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth

“The list total isn't important, but the birds themselves are important. Every bird you see. So the list is just a frivolous incentive for birding, but the birding itself is worthwhile.”
― Kenn Kaufman, Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder

“Some of us find meaning in creation—of building things that have never existed before, be they made of words or pigment or wood. Some of us find meaning in exploration and discovery—of finding new places, or new ways of looking at known places; of looking so close, or so far, that we see things that have not been seen before. Some of us find meaning in healing, in touch and insight that results in betterment, which allows the person on the receiving end to become more functional. Others in helping in other ways, or in elucidating—in teaching, for instance. Others in communication or interpretation, in building teams, or in leading them.”
― Heather E. Heying

“Passion is like the petrol that fuels the car. On the other hand, our purpose is the direction the vehicle is going.”
― Debbie Haski-Leventhal

“What you do will only ever be as good as WHY you do it.”
― Zach Mercurio, The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose

“There are fundamental ways that meaning informs our lives and work, if we are conscious of it and recognize its shape. The shape meaning takes in marketing is empathy: All relevant customer understanding and communications flow from being aware of and aligned with the customer’s needs and motivations. In business in a broader sense, the shape meaning takes is strategy. It guides every decision and action. In technology and data science, meaning can drive the pursuit of applied knowledge toward that which improves our experiences and our lives. Creative work becomes more meaningful the more it conveys truth. And in our lives overall, an understanding of what is meaningful to us provides us with purpose, clarity, and intention.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“To consider meaning at any level implies a search for the depth and dimensions of what is significant, what truly matters.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“Life with women is risky and dangerous, but without women it is completely boring and unmeaningful. Life consists of hard choice, therefore, between risk and interest, danger and meaningfulness, respectively.”
― Elmar Hussein

“All life experience provides meaning and purpose. There is never any waste in God's economy.”
― Linda McGinn Waterman, Dancing In The Storm: Successfully Embracing Change

“I hold no interest in the tapestry of politics, culture, or religion. I lack the mental aptitude and intellectual capacity to debate nuances of esoteric philosophy and abstract ethical principles. I cannot repose faith in a national ethos that promotes avariciousness, mediocrity, and hedonism. I find no reassurance and emotional wellbeing in adopting religious piety, which requires acceptance and belief of intangible and empirically unprovable concepts and things. It is foolish to squander an earthly life in pursuit of a perfect afterlife, of which there is no evidence. Nor can I endorse suicide because it accomplishes nothing other than terminating a person’s opportunity to meld meaning out of the starkness of existence. I exert no power over external things and gain nothing from resisting fate. I need to accept fate calmly and dispassionately, make productive use of my modest allotment of time, and not waste the spark of existence. I can discover the object of my earnest pursuit only within the flickering self. I am responsible for my actions, which I can examine and control through rigorous exertion of self-discipline.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Allow yourself to be amazed, awestruck, and completely dumbfounded by life's mysteries and magic. We don't have to fully understand everything in life to feel meaningfully alive.”
― Donald T Iannone, D.Div.

“Is it absurd compulsively to labor in an effort to express the present crucible of our earthly reality conjoined with our punch-holed dreams? Does penal work on a chain gang dull the senses or does all honest work give birth to a person’s creative sensibilities? Must we actively participate in all the evocative activities of life or risk becoming forever stymied by indifference, self-doubt, and by the petrifying summons of self-loathing? Is it absurd to dismiss ourselves and dejectedly resign ourselves to occupying a windowless soul? Must I accept living as an emotional midget? Should I capitulate to stumbling along frozen in a daze of bewildering hopelessness? Alternatively, can I impose a moratorium upon my present suffering and attempt to discern a better way to live? What is the correct path to end suffering and discover joy? No one else is interested in my story, but I still feel an irrepressible need to shape the tale of my travails into a storyboard format.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Quelle [est] la quantité minimale de passé nécessaire à la production de sens?”
― Nancy Huston, Cantique des plaines

“Often I think God does not matter.”
― F. Richard Thomas

“Art. Art is something that fills life with all the colors one can immerse in. An expression bought by a moment of joy, the settling sun letting every element express its own color, quiet lonely walks after overtime work in winter nights, the hum of engine in foggy night, the lonely street lamps with a lonely wanderer. All express life beautifully into an art that brings meaning to exsistance and blesses a color to life-- every truly beautiful person I know is exactly like that, detailed.”
― Efrat Cybulkiewicz

“Almost every form of meaning is constructed. We convince ourselves and each other that this stuff matters because that's how we get stuff done.”
― John Green