Quotes about Meaning

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

When traveling is made too easy and comfortable, its spiritual meaning is lost. This may be called sentimentalism, but a certain sense of loneliness engendered by traveling leads one to reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after all a travelling from one unknown to another unknown.

If you're like many of us, you've spent years trying to feel comfortable in your own skin and to figure out what to do with your life. This is your most important purpose: to fully move into the power of your authentic self and to discover how to put that power to work in the world. There's a reason why you are here and a special way to accomplish your role in the world. But so much of us feel a lack of clarity around all this. We feel out of touch with our true nature and aren't sure why.

It is a rare person who can pierce the veil between ordinarly life, consumed with matters of physical survival, and pursuit of the empowered path of purpose and meaning unless he or she is motivated by a crisis. Most often we require the failure of some system of power that we rely on before we take action.

I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things--the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos--are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.

We women, when we're searching for a meaning to our lives or for the path of knowledge, always identify with one of four classic archetypes.

The Virgin (and I'm not speaking here of a sexual virgin) is the one whose search springs from her complete independence, and everything she learns is the fruit of her ability to face challenges alone.

The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, suffering, and surrender.

The Saint finds her true reason for living in unconditional love and in her ability to give without asking anything in return.

Finally, the Witch justifies her existence by going in search of complete and limitless pleasure.

We have come into this exquisite world to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom and light!

Some people say that the best stories have no words...  It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid.  The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues.  The true things are too big or too small or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.
I know that. But I know something else too...  Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence.  And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns.  Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.

Human beings can't live without the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves. The writer is just the messenger, the moving target. Inside culture, the writer is the talking self. Through history, the writing that lasts is the whisper of conscience. The guild of writers is essentially a medieval guild existing in a continual Dark Age, shaman, monks, witches, nuns, working in isolation, playing with fire.

When the first illuminated manuscripts were created, few people could read. Now that people are bombarded with image and information and the World Wide Web is an open vein, few people can read. Reading with sustained attention, reading for understanding, reading to cut through random meaninglessness - such reading becomes a subversive act. The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language. Ego enters in, but writing is far too hard and solitary to be sustained by ego. The writer is compelled to write. The writer writes for love. The writer lives in spiritual debt to language, the gold key in the palm of meaning. Awake, asleep, in every moment of being, the writer stands at the gate.

The gate may open.
The gate may not.
Regardless, the writer can see straight through it.

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

No event for the Koyukon – or for most other indigenous peoples – is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.

Listen to what your higher wisdom has to say about how you can deepen your participation in the global shift--through personal healing, changing your worldview, or finding ways to help others and the environment. This is how you can both heal yourself and help humanity. At their deepest level, the two are joined and ready to awaken to a new world.

Somewhere in our search for reality we have passed something by, something important that we no longer find amid the bits and pieces of disassembled matter--something vital that we cannot build out of these parts. There is surely something else, some piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun.

Science has discovered much. The engineering is wonderful, epicycles and all. And yet, as we look at this vast, elaborate structure built on layer and layer of complex constituents, can we help but be reminded of the Land of Oz. Have we found the Emerald City? Is this what we were searching for? Is this the ultimate fabric of reality? Is this all there is?

In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.

Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.

No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give.

Ask yourself: at which level can I give love?

1. Love the oneness in those people with whom you can truly be yourself, can find comfort in their thoughts, can feel supported in your own discoveries, and can feel loved unconditionally.

2. Love the shared friendship in those who are eager to be with you and learn from you.

3. Love from a distance those people who enjoy conversation only at the social level, and discourage what you would consider more meaningful conversation.

4. Love the God fiber in those people who make it difficult or impossible for you to be with them, care about them, or honor their path.

And with the passing years, what had once seemed like a miracle or the luckiest of chances and which he had always promised himself he would never become enslaved by, has gradually become his sole reason to go on living.

Normal is:

1. Anything that makes us forget who we are and what we want; that way we can work in order to produce, reproduce, and earn money.

2. Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention).

3. Spending years studying at university only to find out at the end of it all that you're unemployable.

4. Working from nine till five every day at something that gives you no pleasure just so that, after thirty years, you can retire.

5. Retiring and discovering that you no longer have enough energy to enjoy life and dying a few years out of sheer boredom.

6. Using Botox.

7. Believing that power is much more important than money and that money is much more important than happiness.

8. Making fun of anyone who seeks happiness rather than money and accusing them of "lacking ambition."

9. Comparing objects like cars, houses, clothes, and defining life according to those comparisons, instead of trying to discover the real reason for being alive.

10. Never talking to strangers. Saying nasty things about the neighbors.

11. Believing that your parents are always right.

12. Getting married, having children, and staying together long after all love has died, saying that it's for the good of the children (who are, apparently, deaf to the constant rows).

12a. Criticizing anyone who tries to be different.

14. Waking up each morning to a hysterical alarm clock on the bedside table.

15. Believing absolutely everything that appears in print.

16. Wearing a scrap of colored cloth around your neck, even though it serves no useful purpose, but which answers to the name of "tie."

17. Never asking a direct question, even though the other person can guess what it is you want to know.

18. Keeping a smile on your lips even when you're on the verge of tears. Feeling sorry for those who show their feelings.

19. Believing that art is either worth a fortune or worth nothing at all.

20. Despising anything that was easy to achieve because if no sacrifice was involved, it obviously isn't worth having.

21. Following fashion trends, however ridiculous or uncomfortable.

22. Believing that all famous people have tons of money saved up.

23. Investing a lot of time and money in external beauty and caring little about internal beauty.

24. Using every means possible to show that, although you're just an ordinary human being, you're far above other mortals.

25. Never looking anyone in the eye when you're traveling on public transport, in case it's interpreted as a sign that you're trying to get off with them.

26. Standing facing the door in an elevator and pretending you're the only person there, no matter how crowded it is.

27. Never laughing too loudly in a restaurant no matter how good the joke.

28. In the northern hemisphere, always dressing according to the season: bare arms in spring (however cold it is) and woolen jacket in winter (however hot it is).

29. In the southern hemisphere, covering the Christmas tree with fake snow even though winter has nothing to do with the birth of Christ.

30. Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.

31. Going to a charity tea party and thinking that you've done your bit toward putting an end to social inequity in the world.

32. Eating three times a day even if you're not hungry.

33. Believing that other people are always better than you--better-looking, more capable, richer, more intelligent--and that it's very dangerous to step outside your own limits, so it's best to do nothing.

34. Using your car as a weapon and impenetrable armor.

35. Swearing when in heavy traffic.

36. Believing everything your child does wrong is entirely down to the company he or she keeps.

37. Marrying the first person who offers you a decent position in society. Love can wait.

38. Always saying, "I tried" when you didn't really try at all.

39. Postponing doing the really interesting things in life for later, when you don't have the energy.

40. Avoiding depression with large daily doses of television.

41. Believing that you can be sure of everything you've achieved.

42. Assuming that women don't like football and that men aren't intersted in home decorating and cooking.

43. Blaming the government for all the bad things that happen.

44. Thinking that being a good, decent, respectable person will mean that others will see you as weak, vulnerable, and easy to manipulate.

45. Being equally convinced that aggression and rudeness are synonymous with having a "powerful personality."

46. Being afraid of having an endoscopy (if you're a man) and giving birth (if you're a woman).

Living wisdom cannot be confined within words, but it can be hinted at through situations, much as a specific feature of an otherwise undistinguished landscape can often be discerned by following the path projected by a pointing finger. "Them that have ears, let them hear," said Jesus; whoever "hears" the inner import of words will be able to "see" their inward meaning.

Compassion is the answer to our question.  Power is not an answer, but the begging of the question.

Compassion vs. Power.
In life, beginning in infancy, we seek compassion.  Yet, we see power all around us, so we are curious.  We are offered compassion, but suspect that power is better.  So, when power is offered or available for taking, we often forget that compassion is the answer to our question.  Power is not an answer, but an endless question.

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18.  This is considered normal.  Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other.  If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience.  The authors of thousands of books pu

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

I say only, but what does that mean?

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
[this quote also appears in Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Chapter 9, p. 28]