Significance Quotes - Page 34

• I'm not a religious person. I don't have any desire. To me it's imitative of a conventional culture. I'm all for it for anybody. I totally have a free and open feeling about how other humans want to live their lives. It's just not something that has any real significance for me.

  Lily Tomlin

  Religious, Real, Feelings

  Interview with Monica Attard, www.abc.net.au. February 27, 2011.

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• One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Travel, Phrases

  Mark Twain (2015). “The Innocents Abroad”, p.407, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• My likely historical significance is a terrible burden. ~ Calvin

  Bill Watterson

  Historical, Burden, Terrible

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• Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Sky, Giving, Mountain

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.43, Penguin

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• From looking at your neighbor and realizing his true significance, and that he will die, pity and compassion will arise in you for him and finally you will love him.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Compassion, Realizing, Pity

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• Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

  Eric Hoffer

  Ideas, Action, Prelude

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.

  Karen Armstrong

  Fall, Men, Origin Of Life

  Karen Armstrong (2011). “The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism”, p.14, Ballantine Books

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• I knew what the sanctified life was not. Not a life filled with more rituals, more scrupulously observed. Not more praying. Not becoming a better person, being more charitable, more concerned with everyone else's pains. Sanctifying had something to do with a sense of constant wonder - feeling gratitude and finding significance everywhere, in every action, relationship and object.

  Vanessa L Ochs

  Gratitude, Pain, Feelings

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• No one must think that Newton’s great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this [Theory of Relativity] or by any other theory. His clear and wide ideas will for ever retain their significance as the foundation on which our modern conceptions of physics have been built.

  Albert Einstein

  Real, Thinking, Ideas

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• The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Death, Freedom, Cutting

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, A.V. Miller (tr.) (1998). “Phenomenology of Spirit”, p.360, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.

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• Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Morning, Reflection

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.247, Simon and Schuster

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• It is true, these Roman Catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself. Nevertheless, they are capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Yankees, Oxen, People

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Yankee in Canada”, p.17, Graphic Arts Books

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• Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wise, Dream, Believe

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• What is it that endowed things with meaning, value, significance? The creating heart, which desired, and, out of its desire, created. It created joy and woe. It wanted to satiate itself with woe. We must take all the suffering that has been endured by men and animals upon ourselves and affirm it, and possess a goal in which it acquires reason.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Heart, Men, Animal

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• The use of a thing is only a part of its significance. To know anything thoroughly, to have the full command of it in all its appliances, we must study it on its own account, independently of any special application.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Special, Use, Study

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• The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Real, Heart

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1984). “Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.247, U of Nebraska Press

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• It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship.

  John Fuller

  Names, Poetry, Guarantees

  John Fuller (2011). “Who Is Ozymandias?: And other Puzzles in Poetry”, p.194, Random House

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• It takes faith to find personal significance in your relationship with God rather than how much money you earn, how beautiful you look, how many toys you own, how many trophies you collect, or how much territory you conquer and control.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Beautiful, Toys, Looks

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• Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Attention, Exhausted

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• In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Silence, Acting

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.276, CUP Archive

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• Carl Orff's Carmina Burana has the ability to take you from placidity to power in one sonic breath. It is music of dignity and strength, with primitive, energetic passages, evoking absolute beauty from the simplest of phrases. It brings up something that has everything to do with significance - squeezing joy and motif that you just can't drop - it stays with you.

  Robert Genn

  Music, Joy, Phrases

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• The Christian religion seems to have fulfilled its great biological purpose, in so far as we are able to judge. It has led human thought to independence, and has lost its significance, therefore, to a yet undetermined extent.... It seems to me that we might still make use in some way of its form of thought, and especially of its great wisdom of life, which for two thousand years has proven to be particularly efficacious.

  Carl Jung

  Christian, Years, Two

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• A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance.

  Antoni Tapies

  Space, Shapes, Firsts

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 27), 2004.

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• The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.

  Alfred Adler

  Goal, Psychology, Feelings

  From a new translation of "Progress in Individual Psychology" by Alfred Adler, in the AAISF/ATP Archives, 1923.

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• In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

  Bertrand Russell

  Fall, Reality, Errors

  Bertrand Russell (2007). “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, p.170, Spokesman Books

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