Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else – mind, spirit, morality, meaning – into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn’t have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.
I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful.
Being pregnant finally helped me understand what my true relationship was with my body – meaning that it wasn’t put on this earth to look good in a swimsuit.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
The feeling of being an outsider was a big part of my childhood. I think that helps comedians. That feeling of being an outsider. That desire for a perspective that’s all your own. The idea for me to make stuff myself with my own meaning came from that as well.
I was a big party guy in my twenties, and kind of a playboy as well. I adopted a lot of values and goals that were fairly superficial and, in many cases, self-destructive. They looked cool and sounded sexy on the surface, but underneath, there was no real meaning going on, just a lot of escapism.
In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don’t pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.
I was covering the Supreme Court when it decided Gideon v. Wainright, and the case has always had special meaning for me.
Go and experience life the way that someone else might experience it. Maybe you’ll find meaning in a different corner of your brain. The fact that it changed doesn’t negate the fact that it ever mattered.
The Keystone XL project has built strong safety measures into its design with the newest technology. Additionally, 80 percent of the new Canadian oil sands are being developed ‘in situ,’ meaning, it has a similar carbon footprint and emissions as conventional oil wells.
Nowadays, people don’t ask you how you are, they say, ‘Are you busy?’ meaning, ‘Are you well?’ If someone actually does ask you how you are, the most cheerful answer, of course, is a robust ‘Busy!’ to which the person will reply ‘Good!’
Everyone – pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist – has to answer these questions: ‘Where did I come from? What is life’s meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?’ Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.
Life is difficult. Not just for me or other ALS patients. Life is difficult for everyone. Finding ways to make life meaningful and purposeful and rewarding, doing the activities that you love and spending time with the people that you love – I think that’s the meaning of this human experience.
You could lose hundreds or thousands one day on paper and gain it all back the next, and it has literally no effect on your immediate future, provided the money you have in the market is money you’re investing for the long haul (meaning at least three to five years).
Two best friends can totally say they love and adore each other, without any meaning of romance.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what’s going to happen next. In fact we don’t. To recognize that we don’t know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward – that’s one meaning of faith.
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
Even in this glowering age, morality animates our lives with meaning.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It’s better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it’s a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.
If you had to pick the values that would be held dear to a broad number of Hispanic voters, access to opportunity would be a higher value than guarantee of security, particularly amongst the newly arrived, meaning the last 20 years.
I learned early on about the real meaning of equity and inclusion, and that when those guiding principles are not met, they can have devastating effects on individuals, families, and communities.
For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death – the only certainty that life holds for us – must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life.
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.
It is the experiences, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive!
In music, you can use metaphors with ease – if a person doesn’t understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute… that gives meaning to our lives.
I’ve been asked many times if I considered myself a narcissist, so I looked up the real meaning of the word, and I came to the conclusion that indeed I am one. I think of myself as better than other people, not every person, but many, unique and talented, and I aim to success.
I think the sense of community that exists with all the characters – that’s the answer. The fact that they have found a family in their friends. It does give some depth and meaning to their lives.
I think the meaning of abortion is what the woman says it is: For a woman who wants a child but can’t have this one, it can be sad; for a woman who doesn’t want a baby, it can feel like a huge relief, like having your whole life given back to you.
I live by ‘Earnin’ and burnin’.’ Meaning, I like to make money and spend it before I even have it. That’s the way I live my life.
Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
Why should Iran have a deterrent strategy? Well, it’s surrounded by hostile enemies. Both of its borders have been under occupation by a hostile superpower, the United States, which is constantly violating the U.N. charter by leaving open what they call the saying, ‘all options are open’ – meaning the threat of war.
I work from a personal place, and the work has personal meaning for me.
Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by God.
I don’t separate architecture, design, or culture. What’s more important is a language of creativity that carries meaning.
Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.
When Merle and I started out we called our music ‘traditional plus,’ meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
Making it big in this world is such a rip-off, you gotta keep your head together or it can be totally without meaning.
Lemon curd is a basic custard, meaning it’s thickened by eggs. Although many curd recipes call for just yolks, I prefer to use a combination of whole eggs and yolks to add a bit of lightness.
As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.
