1,900 Quotes About Meaning

In the old days, when Hawaiians wanted to give a gift, they doesn't have Safeway. Or any money. They had to take from nature what the gods gave them. Gather the flowers, make the twine, string the flowers. Lots of time and effort. We do the work just to say, 'I love you.' No meaning when we buy a lei in the supermarket.

We are not the names our realms bestow on us; rather we are what we are in our hearts.

Nothing new can happen here, so all you do is think about the days of life when possibility hadn't been ripped from you forever, when anything could happen, and wonder why so much was squandered, so much wasted.

Words are wonderfully elastic. They can be mispronounced, misspelled, misused or mistranslated. Even the most precise technical term can be stretched into a verb or adjective, slang or idiom, stretched all the way around until it finds itself facing itself, a mirror image, the exact opposite of itself. Mark my words, it can.

We must ask ourselves, in the long run, which of our material objects truly enhance our lives?

Before 1802, cirrus, cumulus, and altostratus clouds hadn’t been given names. Untitled before 1802, the shapes were present in the sky, ethereal or ephemeral, presumably since the big bang, but un-designated, until they needed to be. Why then?The world hasn’t been fully seen, until it is named.

Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person. (p.166)

Sometimes what people say is not what they do, so watch them closely, to see if they mean what they say by what they do.

Language is the charnel house of man.