1,900 Quotes About Meaning

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

I don't talk things, sir,' said Faber. 'I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive.

I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

Belief Initiates and guides action— Or it does nothing.

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.