Mother Teresa was asked what was the meaning of life, and she said to help other people, and I thought, ‘What a strange thing to say’ – but maybe it’s the right thing to say.
‘Culture’ is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
It seems essential to try to find some meaning to life and I guess Jungian philosophy is the one that’s helped me understand myself and the world more than anything else.
The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The name I’d like to give to the kind of relationship that gives us a chance to find such things is a ‘circle of meaning.’
People talk about method actors, meaning someone that’s prepared very, very well, or whatever they mean when they talk about it. But the right method is whatever works for you. And what works for me on any given day is going to be different.
I think it’s good if a song has more than one meaning. Maybe that kind of song can reach far more people.
Our responsibility for BLM lands is multiple-use, meaning a variety of needs and uses.
You don’t have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?
Balancing family and work is a top priority for me, and I treat it as such. Meaning, I actually put specific family time and events in my calendar so that precious time is dedicated and properly blocked off from any work that may try to sneak its way into my schedule.
I think it’s important to get your surroundings as well as yourself into a positive state – meaning surround yourself with positive people, not the kind who are negative and jealous of everything you do.
The meaning of life. The wasted years of life. The poor choices of life. God answers the mess of life with one word: ‘grace.’
Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, ‘I don’t know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?’ I realized then that we’re all in the same boat. What does anybody know?
I adore themes of hope and courage and the ways we find meaning through suffering.
If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.
For me, ‘Lamb’ started out as a further exploration of the phenomenon of faith and the responsibility of a messiah that I touched on in ‘Coyote Blue’ and ‘Island of the Sequined Love Nun,’ but it ended up being an exploration of the true meaning of sacrifice, loyalty, and friendship.
The usefulness of religion – the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good – is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It’s not an argument that it’s reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.
Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.
That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.
What allows us, as human beings, to psychologically survive life on earth, with all of its pain, drama, and challenges, is a sense of purpose and meaning.
There’s so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they’re sung.
Most importantly, the meaning of spirituality lays the seeds for our destiny and the path we must follow.
Nothing can express the aim and meaning of our work better than the profound words of St. Augustine – ‘Beauty is the splendor of Truth.’
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.
The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.
Some people have said that I can ‘hear’ a hit song, meaning that I can tell the first time a song is played for me if it has potential. I have been able to hear some of the hits that way, but I can also ‘feel’ one.
Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra’s hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.
If falling into desperation worked to make things better, then I would say, ‘Let’s all jump into despair.’ But it doesn’t help. The only way to truly find meaning and fulfillment is to look at the disaster, the pain, the difficulty, and know with complete certainty that good can come from this.
I have to pick myself up every day and say, ‘The show must go on,’ meaning life as I know it must go on, whatever the obstacle is, I know I can handle it, and I can get through it.
The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.
The dissemination of advanced implantable technology will likely be just as ruthlessly democratic as the ailments it is destined to treat. Meaning that, someday soon, we may have a new class of very smart, very fast people – yesterday’s disabled and elderly.
The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says – ‘Notice me, feed me, mother me’ – is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded ‘normality’ it has been such ecstasy to escape.
The greatest way for people to experience a comedy is to go in not knowing anything about it. But because of marketing, it’s impossible. Marketing meaning that in order to get people to come you can’t just go, ‘Hey, there’s a great movie – we’re not going to show you anything from it but trust us!’
Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.
I’m fascinated with design. I realized early that I had no talent in that direction, but I love talking with architects and designers about what they do. I appreciate applied creativity as a source of pleasure and meaning.
I’m very interested in buildings that have meaning for a particular place. I suppose it feels slightly rude to me if the imposed style that lands in a place is almost stronger than the place. For me it’s about inventing a solution for each place; if people then want to know who did it, then great.
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.
Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
One of the annoying things when you’re in a movie is that gets talked about is everyone projects meaning onto everyone’s intentions.
I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.
Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form – or else it is not art.
It is a very serious consideration for a lyricist to step in there and suggest the meaning to a song. The music is speaking for itself.
I have a more developed sense of my priorities. Life has so much more meaning now.
Man is lost and is wandering in a jungle where real values have no meaning. Real values can have meaning to man only when he steps on to the spiritual path, a path where negative emotions have no use.
