Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the...

Courage is the chiaroscuro of characteristics. By that I mean I don’t know what I mean.

It’s immeasurably easier to live in a world that’s all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.

What we do today means a great deal, though it may mean nothing tomorrow.

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to...

As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie… I want it to be about the...

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

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar–I say, you say, he and she, it, on...

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no...

Beautiful is the man who leaves a legacy that of shared love and life. It is he who transfers meaning, assigns significance and conveys in his loving touch the fine art and gentle shaping of...

Not everything that can be counted counts.Not everything that counts can be counted.

Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we...

If I let the past and my goals be the only thing that drives me in life, I will never know the meaning of being happy.

Sex means nothing–just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to?...

Yes, this is what my senses alone have learned:—Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

Life must have its sacred moments and its holy places. We need the infinite, the limitless, the uttermost — all that can give the heart a deep and strengthening peace.

The writing has a meaning only if it is penned down with the heart’s deep feeling.

:Paintings are easy to see,” he said after a moment. “Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols...

Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my cell’s confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house.Who am I? They often tell me I would talk to my warden...

If nothing lasts then everything has meaning. If everything dies that means we actually live.

No man voluntarily expresses his opinion without some intent to make a difference, and even if he does, he shouldn’t.

There is no science without spirituality; spirituality has no meaning without science.

To live, is to suffer. To survive, well, that’s to find meaning in the suffer.

Practices are cultural: they do not submit to the meanings that an individual wants them to have, either for herself or for others.

The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the...

I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, ‘is not as natural as it looks.

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters.

The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn’t talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from...

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even...

The true meaning and purpose of life is to give some meaning and purpose to your life.

Friend’ is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.

O Me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who...

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and...

So many years of being lonely and discounted, no one ever truly seeing me, the person that I really am. The Gabriella I so desperately wanted to be. Yet somehow he broke through the walls...

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me...

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

You were almost like a haiku: said so little, but meant so much.

A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy talesActs like a sick god, but like a god.Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists,He knows things exist, that he exists,He knows...

As palavras em si mesmas não são nada. São apenas letrinhas agrupadas ou um monte de sons combinados de uma certa maneira, mas que não fazem nenhum sentido por si mesmos. É a gente que...

When we work creatively and productively with others, our experience of meaning can be profound. When we work directly for the good of others, meaning deepens in ways that reward us beyond measure. Whenever we...

When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost

There’s a drive in a lost soul—in one that is searching for acceptance, companionship, belonging, whatever you want to call it. The slightest coincidence ignites a spark that one hopes will lead to something meaningful.

The most fragile, unhappy people destine themselves to live lives of constantly reminding themselves to be happy.

Some words were made up without any thought given. Nice is one of them. Nice has no meaning. Nice gets thrown out there to replace something meaningful. Take Goodreads and turn it into Nicereads. This...