Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Meaning

"There needs but thinking right and meaning well." - Alexander Pope

"For centuries and centuries the world has been struggling to divide up economic scarcity, and for the first time we have the tools of abundance with which to meet mankind's basic economic and material needs. If we will use these tools intelligently, with a sense of social and moral responsibility, they will enable us to solve mankind's basic material needs. Then we can devote greater time and energy and effort to the facilitation of man's growth as a social and cultural and spiritual being, which is the real meaning of life on this earth." -

"The meaning of life has something to do with realizing that our essence is perfect love, then going on to live our lives upon that truth, experiencing each day as a miracle and every act as sacred." - Kenneth Ring

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, the farm or office where he works. such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world." -

"Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways." - Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

"There is evil in the world, but it can be overcome through repentance and aspiration, and therein lies the true meaning and adventure in life." - Abba Hillel Silver

"I entreat you not to be turned by the call of vulgar strength, of stupendous size, by the spirit of storage, by the multiplication of millions, without meaning and without end. Cherish the ideal of perfection, and to that, relate all your work and all your movements. Though you love the material things of earth, they will not hurt you and you will bring heaven to earth and soul into things." -

"The best of us still have our aspirations for the supreme goals of life, which is so often mocked by prosperous people who now control the world. We still believe that the world has a deeper meaning than what is apparent, and that therein the human soul finds its ultimate harmony and peace. We still know that only in spiritual wealth does civilization attain its end, not in a prolific production of materials, and not in the competition of intemperate power with power." -

"The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union." -

"The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which once realised makes all movements full of meaning and joy. But if we detach its movements from that ultimate idea, if we do not see the infinite rest and only see the infinite motion, then existence appears to us a monstrous evil., impetuously rushing towards an unending aimlessness." -

"There are men whose idea of life is tactic, who long for its continuation after death only because of their wish for permanence and not perfection; they love to imagine that the things to which they are accustomed will persist for ever. They completely identify themselves in their minds with their fixed surroundings and with whatever they have gathered, and to have to leave these is death for them. They forget that the true meaning of living is outliving, it is ever growing out of itself." -

"Want of love is a degree of callousness; for love is the perfection of consciousness. We do not love because we do not comprehend, or rather we do not comprehend because we do not love. For love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation." -

"Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have every strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding." - Lionel Trilling

"What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well." - Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani

"A man who is born blind will never know the meaning of darkness." - Veda NULL

"Most forms of human creativity have one aspect n common: the attempt to give some sense to the various impressions, emotions, experiences, and actions that fill our lives, and thereby to give some meaning and value to our existence... The crisis of our time in the Western world is that the search for meaning has become meaningless for many of us." - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

"Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life." -

"Sharing is the great and imperative need of our time. An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen but greatens his life, especially if sharing be done not formally nor conventionally, but rather with such heartiness as springs out of an understanding of the meaning of the religion of sharing." - Stephen Samuel Wise

"There is a mistaken notion prevailing among some parents that discipline is the same thing as punishment. It is not. Discipline comes from a Latin word meaning "to teach." The best discipline is that which teaches, not the kind that hurts." - J. C. Wynn

"Creation is a continuing process... One meaning of our life, then, is the opportunity and challenge it presents to us for participation in the continuous process of creation - through discussion and cooperative work rather than conflict." -

"You cannot take any performance (even an interior performance) as itself an act of intention; for if you describe a performance, the fact that it has taken place is not a proof of intention; words for example may occur in somebody’s mind without his meaning them. so intention is never a performance in the mind, though in some matters a performance in the mind which is seriously meant may make a difference to the correct account of the man’s action - e.g., in embracing someone. But the matters in question are necessarily ones in which outward acts are ‘significant’ in some way." - Elizabeth Anscombe, fully Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret "G. E. M." Anscombe

"The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education." - Antisthenes NULL

"I encounter death not so much as a problem to be solved, nor a puzzle to be pieced together, but as a mystery to be experienced. Death, whatever its meaning and real nature, seems always to elude us. It is, always and finally, a mystery. And mystery refuses to be captured and be used. We do not capture it, but are captured by it. And being captured, we can be 'engaged' to death and allow it to reveal its depth and richness." - Mitsuo "Mits" Aoki

"Through faith man experiences the meaning of the world; through action he is to give to it a meaning." - Leo Baeck

"Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning." - Gamaliel Bailey

"Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV." - Bruno Bettelheim

"There are other similarities between poetry and children's speech. Poets tend to look for significant evocative detail --something straight out of life -- to carry their meaning, and to avoid the vaguely general or abstract terms. With young children it is not a matter of choice. Their ideas must take a concrete form of expression because they have not mastered the art of masking and handling (Sign-mind) abstraction. A five year old boy in an infants' class once said, "Oh, yes, I know Geography. Its polar bears at the top and penguins at the bottom."" -

"Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance." -

"The meaning of life cannot be separated from the meaning of death. Even the sun dies, so death is natural too. Only suffering must be appeased." - Henri Cartier-Bresson

"And all your dreams and other such like folly, to deep oblivion let them be consigned; for they arise but from your melancholy, by which your health is being undermined. A straw for all the meaning you can find in dreams! They aren’t worth a hill of beans, for no one knows what dreaming really means." - Geoffrey Chaucer

"Teachers of today must have the ability to bring personal meaning to ideas as they investigate, interpret and integrate their thoughts. They must possess their own unique conceptual frameworks on which to hang ideas. They should be able to select, and build upon, significant ideas, observe relationships, and distinguish essential matters from irrelevant and incidental ones." - Dean C. Corrigan

"We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition." - John Dewey

"We never seem to know what anything means till we have lost it. The full significance of those words, property, ease, health - the wealth of meaning that lies in the fond epithets, parent, child friend, we never know till they are taken away; till in place of the bright, visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow where nothing is - where we stretch our hands in vain, ands strain our eyes upon dark and dismal vacuity." - Orville Dewey

"It is arrogance to think that the earthbound have any true grasp of the complex meaning, or meanings, of life; we have not yet gathered all the data. Our own significance, our ultimate potential and our ensemble of possible destinies will be understood only by finding and studying the other intelligent creatures of space. Thus, a prime task for us is to seek these other intelligent civilizations and join them in shared knowledge. We now have the means to do so, and if we are as noble as we think, we will proceed vigorously with this enterprise." - Frank Drake

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth." - Albert Einstein

"No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”" - Jerry Falwell

"The magic of marriage is that it creates meaningful goals to work for, struggle for, sacrifice for. It is the joint struggle that gives the relationship its meaning, and keeps people alive." - Henry Gregor Felsen

"For men who matter, life's intangibles have more meaning than tangibles." - B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes

"It is easy enough to endow the Matterhorn with another and less exalted meaning. The scale of 1:50,000 may be roughly the proportion in which fate fulfills our wishes, and in which we ourselves carry out our good intentions." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his power." -

"There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding of his powers." -

"There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively." -

"There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself." -

"I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future." - Kurt Gödel, also Goedel

"We are born and we die. By understanding our interrelatedness to the chain gang of life, meaning comes." - Nancy Graves

"There is no separation between a patient’s neurobiology, spiritual life, life perspectives, and quality of life force. Words, and spiritual/therapeutic interventions can tangibly affect a patient’s neurochemistry and physical health just as assuredly as psycho-pharmacological drugs can tangibly affect a patient’s feelings and thoughts... I have found that working with the meaning of a patient’s illness can profoundly alter not only the prognosis but can influence and give meaning to all other aspects of a patient’s life. Depression, for example, is often a direct communication from the soul that one’s belief system is not working... It is all too easy, and part of the human condition, to be misled by our lower half into believing that the sensory world is all that’s real." - Brian Greer

"The service we render to others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth. It is obvious that man is himself a traveler; that the purpose of this world is not "to have and to hold" but "to give and serve." There can be no other meaning." -

"We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things." - Mark Harris

"The times of our lives which hold the deepest meaning for us, from which we learn the most, are very often those when we are face to face with problems which seem too great for our strength, with illness, and with death." - Janet Harrison

"But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat." - Molly Haskell