#meaning

The simple tableau is so rich with meaning that whether represented on the mantelpiece or in the mind, it seems suspended, complete unto itself, somewhere in eternity. ↗

— Lucinda Franks

#eternity #itself #mantelpiece #meaning #mind

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it? ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#back #book #does #else #family

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#historically #meaning #socially

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning. ↗

— Walter Gropius

#inner #meaning #only #product #spiritual

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue. ↗

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#feeling #journals #meaning #stories #time

Life isn’t fair. It doesn’t make sense. This unfairness is felt by everyone, from the Las Vegas tunnel dweller all the way to the executive in the high-rise. To some, these “unfair” experiences become a chastening ball and chain attached for the remainder of life. ↗

— John-Talmage Mathis

#life #meaning #experience

I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it. ↗

— Richard Helms

#clients #court #done #failed #fourteen

Our lives are the only meaningful expression of what we believe and in Whom we believe. And the only real wealth, for any of us, lies in our faith. ↗

— Gordon B. Hinckley

#believe #expression #faith #lies #lives

But we as a culture have lost the deep intuitive understanding that Creation exists on many levels. We have succumbed to the scientific viewpoint. Nothing characterizes ‘the modern world’ more completely than the loss of faith in Transcendence, our arrogant lack of any genuine appreciation for levels of reality above our little everyday affairs. The deepest wounds to the human soul have been caused by our lack of appreciation of levels. By shutting the door on transcendence, we have cut off any light from that world that might have illuminated this one, leaving us in darkness,leaving us with nothing but a dead world where scientists are merely performing an autopsy. ↗

— Andrew Cort

#religious-meaning #spirituality #faith

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak. ↗

— Elfriede Jelinek

#composition #example #expose #for example #i