Significance Quotes

• What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.

  Nelson Mandela

  Leadership, Differences, Generosity

  Nelson Mandela (2011). “Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations”, p.227, Pan Macmillan

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• When you pursue significance, success can find you.

  Dov Seidman

  Pursue

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• The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance - and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Success, Dream, Congratulations

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• A person of character seeks true happiness in living a life of purpose and meaning, placing a higher value on significance than success.

  Michael Josephson

  Character, Purpose, True Happiness

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• Significance is about who we are before it is about what we do.

  John Ortberg

  Who We Are

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• A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Matter, Beholder

  "Artists on Art - from the 14th - 20th centuries". Book edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, London, p. 413, 'Notes d'un Peintre' (Notes of a Painter), 1972.

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• The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Spiritual, Order, Environmental

  Evelyn Underhill (1937). “The Spiritual Life”

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• A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Ideas, Mind, Use

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• You will be educated, which means that you will be interested where others are bored, that you will notice unities where others experience randomness, and that you will intend meanings where others are just spouting words. For exactly that is supposed to be the result of becoming literate: The world becomes a thick texture of significance that you know how to “access.

  Eva Brann

  Mean, Bored, Unity

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• I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence.

  Ansel Adams

  Fall, Taken, Past

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• Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery.

  Arthur Tress

  Photography, Fall, Mean

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• Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.

  John Piper

  Passion, Long, Christian Inspirational

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• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

  Aristotle

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Dream, Keys, Focus

  "Happy Birthday Oprah Winfrey: 11 inspirational quotes by the popular host" by Aishwarya Krishnan, www.india.com. January 29, 2016.

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• It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. Every other path leads to a dead end.

  Rick Warren

  Destiny, Identity, Purpose

  Rick Warren (2007). “The Purpose Driven Life Dvd Study Guide: A Six-session Video-based Study for Groups Or Individuals”, p.93, Harper Collins

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• This ennui, for which we Saxons had no name,--this word of France, has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Light, Names, Boredom

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.260

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• I like to aim for significance over success because rarely can you be significant and also successful, but many people can be successful and not significant.

  Alyson Stoner

  Successful, People, Significant

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Beauty, Beautiful, Flower

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• In the desert the detachment of life from all normal intercourse imparts a sense of gravity to every rencontre, and each touch with human beings is fraught with a significance lacking in the too hurried intercourse of ordinary everyday life. On the desert track, there is no such thing as a casual meeting.

  Mildred Cable

  Track, Everyday, Normal

  Mildred Cable, Francesca French (1944). “The Gobi Desert”

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• I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.

  Pablo Casals

  Inspirational, Kindness, Caring

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

  George Steiner

  Translate, Decipher

  George Steiner (1998). “After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation”, p.12, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Your impact on the world is significant whether or not you are aware of it, and even whether or not you desire it.

  Gary Zukav

  Impact, Desire, World

  FaceBook post by Gary Zukav from May 11, 2015

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• Many people measure their success by wealth, recognition, power and status. There's nothing wrong with those, but if that's all you're focused on, you're missing the boat...if you focus on significance -using your time and talent to serve others -that's when truly meaningful success can come your way.

  Ken Blanchard

  Meaningful, People, Focus

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• I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible; to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.

  Dawna Markova

  Inspirational, Life, Fall

  Dawna Markova (2000). “I Will Not Die An Unlived Life: Reclaiming Passion and Purpose”, Conari Press

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• Like a human being, the mountain is a composite creature, only to be known after many a view from many a different point, and repaying this loving study, if it is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of personality, an increase of significance.

  Freya Stark

  Views, Personality, Mountain

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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