Significance Quotes - Page 33

• It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.

  Felix S. Cohen

  Fall, Thinking, Air

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• The significance of life is living.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Life Is, Significance Of Life

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• No one fully understands spinors. Their algebra is formally understood but their general significance is mysterious. In some sense they describe the 'square root' of geometry and, just as understanding the square root of -1 took centuries, the same might be true of spinors.

  Michael Atiyah

  Squares, Roots, Understanding

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• Religion is not something separate and apart from ordinary life. It is life - life of every kind viewed from the standpoint of meaning and purpose: life lived in the fuller awareness of its human quality and spiritual significance.

  A. Powell Davies

  Life, Spiritual, Insightful

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• Even though the search for meaning is debunked today, the cries of the human heart can be smothered for only so long. In these yearnings, the search for significance and fulfillment continues.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Heart, Long, Today

  Source: verticallivingministries.com

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• The image of God carries with it the right not to be mistreated or harmed.... Regardless of their record or character, all human beings have an irreducible glory and significance to them, because God loves them.... So we must treasure each and every human being as a way of showing due respect for the majesty of their owner and Creator.

  Timothy Keller

  Character, Records, Treasure

  Timothy Keller (2010). “Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just”, p.57, Penguin

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• Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Simple, World, Common

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1965). “Who is Man?”, p.89, Stanford University Press

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• Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction... She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed - the uncomfortable half - while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.

  Eliot Porter

  Photography, Mistake, Eye

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• There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one's experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.

  Howard Thurman

  Courage, Spring, Rivers

  Howard Thurman (2014). “Meditations of the Heart”, p.52, Beacon Press

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• In the real world of research, conventional tests of [statistical] significance seem almost worthless.

  Fischer Black

  Real, Research, World

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• There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.

  Antonio Damasio

  Sorry, Emotional, Thinking

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• It may be a product of me being raised in episcopal church, but I have a love for ritual and theater and the significance of doing the exact same thing over and over. So I really love knowing every little thing I'm going to do during a show.

  Jonathan Meiburg

  Knowing, Church, May

  "Shearwater". Interview with Jason Crock, pitchfork.com. April 24, 2007.

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• At the end of the first half-century of engine-driven flight, we are confronted with the stark fact that the historical significance of aircraft has been primarily military and destructive.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Military, Flying, Historical

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• A nasty day! A nasty day! 'Twas thus I heard a critic say Because the skies were bleak and gray— And yet it somehow seemed to me The day was all that it should be. I looked it very closely o'er; Its hours still were twenty-four, With sixty minutes each—no less— For deeds of good and helpfulness; And every second full of chance To give the day significance; And every hour full of growth For everybody but the sloth— I couldn't see it quite that way, For though the skies were bleak and gray The day itself, it seemed to me, Was all a day could rightly be.

  John Kendrick Bangs

  Attitude, Sixty Minutes, Sky

  John Kendrick Bangs (1920). “The Cheery Way: A Bit of Verse for Every Day”

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• Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.

  Ralph Ellison

  Growing Up, Attitude, Our Society

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• All sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a Hero, -- the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Hero, Fighting, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (1871). “The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.271

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• An important measure of our true commitment to environmental quality is our dedication to protecting the wilderness and its inhabitants. We must recognize their ecological significance and preserve them as sources of inspiration and education. And we need them as places of quiet refuge and reflection.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Inspiration, Commitment, Reflection

  Nixon, Richard M. (1975). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1973”, p.101, Best Books on

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• For a parent, it's hard to recognize the significance of your work when you're immersed in the mundane details. Few of us, as we run the bath water or spread the peanut butter on the bread, proclaim proudly, "I'm making my contribution to the future of the planet." But with the exception of global hunger, few jobs in the world of paychecks and promotions compare in significance to the job of parent.

  Joyce Maynard

  Running, Jobs, Water

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• Rare is the book that can actually transform us into better, more fulfilled people. Having combed through the research and documented case studies all over the world, Kristof and WuDunn present the clearest view I have ever seen of the human soul. A Path Appears tells us whether we are intrinsically good, why specific ways we parent our newborns help predict their chances for success, and how we can live lives of greater significance. This book, full of rich and riveting true stories, reminds us that human greatness is all around us, and even within us, if we dare to look.

  Ann Curry

  Live Life, Book, Greatness

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• The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Art, Hands, Stories

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• I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action.

  Winifred Holtby

  Animal, Roots, Body

  Winifred Holtby, Alice Holtby (1941). “Letters to a friend”

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• Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumle along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?

  Alice James

  Feet, Soul, Deities

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• The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call "civilization" rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Ignorance, Civilization, Profound

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Part I. The Value of Freedom, Chap. 2 : The Creative Power of a Free Civilization, 1960.

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• Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

  John Stuart Blackie

  Plato, Simple, Order

  John Stuart Blackie (1881). “Lay Sermons”

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• To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?

  Barbara Tuchman

  History, Smoking, Events

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.25, Random House

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