Meaning Making Quotes

We cannot live without meaning, that would preclude any sense of identity, any hope, any future. ~ Carlina Rinaldi

MEANING-MAKING The Human Adventure "Nothing means anything on its own. Meaning comes not from seeing or even observation alone, for there is no 'alone' in this sort. Neither is meaning lying around in nature waiting to be scooped up by the senses; rather it is constructed. 'Constructed' in this context means produced in acts of interpretation." Humberto R. Maturana "What an organism does is organize, and what a human organism organizes is meaning. It is not that a person makes meaning as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making. There is thus no feeling, no experience, no thought, no perception, independent of a meaning-making context in which it becomes a feeling, an experience, a thought, a perception, because we are the meaning-making context. ~ L. Michael Hall

The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him. ~ Lev Shestov

Life Is an Ambiguous Stimulus

In a very real sense, life is an ambiguous stimulus. Does survival of a heart attack indicate that death is imminent or that one has been given a new lease on life? Is falling in love an assurance of a lifelong partnership or the first sign of an inevitable heartbreak? Many human situations are complex and their meanings subtle. Thus, to make sense of and gain agency over our experiences, we engage in the process of self-reflection.
Through self-reflection, people come to realize that their lives are filled with uncertainty about their own identities, their relationships with others, and their environmental circumstances. Because living involves adaptation to irregular changes and perturbations from the environment, the process of self-reflection reveals the indefinite nature of life. The uncertainty stemming from threatening stimuli whose nature is unknown or unpredictable evokes stress and a sense of loss of control. In response to uncertainty, we are driven to make meaning of our experiences and in so doing to reduce uncertainty. Indeed, a series of cunning experiments demonstrated that the sense of lacking control promotes illusory pattern perception in ambiguous situations. Hence, people consciously or unconsciously attempt to regain a sense of control by projecting patterns onto the chaos of their lives. This meaning-making process hinged on the appraisal of stressors and their meaningful integration into our autobiographica ~ Todd Kashdan

We can no longer assume that our preaching takes place within a more or less 'Christian culture,' " Craig Loscalzo says. "The great narratives of Judeo-Christian belief, the pivotal stories of the Bible's characters, the epoch of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, either are not known or do not carry the meaning-making significance they did to previous generations. ~ Graham M. Johnston

We are committed to our belief that loss is at the heart of growth. We recognize that many forms of loss are not about death, yet we also recognize the importance of the continuation of bonds with the deceased or lost object when death occurs. Further, we value the process of meaning-making in the healing process and hope to help practitioners understand the importance of validating dual-process shifts during the meaning-making process. ~ Carolyn Ambler Walter

The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent. ~ Eric Maisel

Obama wants people, as many people as he can get, covered by the government, exchanges, however you want to phrase it, and the more the better, and the sooner, the better, making it impossible to take it away. Meaning, making it impossible to repeal Obamacare. ~ Rush Limbaugh

But nobody has ever yet called a philosopher "a hired conscience," though everybody gives the lawyer this nickname. Why this partiality? ~ Lev Shestov

Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It's wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It's automatic. It creates empathy. ~ Steven Kotler

We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. But mostly is wet stones. Grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for awhile. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that it is a particular form of play with its own rules. Rather the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play. Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular 'world.' We ar ~ María Lugones

Foundational design principles regarding aesthetics, symbolism and meaning of place were for the old-timer carpenter, simply routine.
Unfortunately, these principles began to lose their footing in the late 1800s, when building practices shifted toward more commercial technologies. ~ Shannon Taylor Scarlett

In order that the concept of substance could originate
which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it
it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency
to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just
had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I was intending to trip on my way back, making her the clear winner, when she whimpered, "I can't believe your not going to let me win, especially after the other night." Her face suddenly fell and I stopped what I was doing for a second when out of nowhere she grabbed my shovel and threw it to the ground before turning to run back to the hutch. "Sucker," she called over her shoulder. ~ Leah Spiegel

I'm making music with my friends. It's fun. It should be fun. You shouldn't make music if it isn't fun. ~ Cass McCombs

When the highest value in a community is loyalty to the greater cause, meaning the continuity of the status quo, all means to this end are imbued with religious significance, and are thereby justified. ~ Pearl Abraham

I am too good at making you see what you want to see. It has been hard my whole life to make that picture seem so perfect. The perfect daughter in the perfect family who was after all not so perfect. There was again only the illusion of what outsiders wanted to see. ~ Abigail George

I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.' ~ Simon McBurney

When it comes to making more money, most people look at the world and see the same opportunities they've seen before: typically, a job. Because they don't awaken their mind and expand their vision, they don't see other opportunities. Yet opportunities do exist. So how do you change your thinking so you can see them? One way to jolt the brain out of its preconceived category thinking is to bombard it with new experiences. ~ Joe Vitale

Don't imagine you are in a worse place than you actually are. Things could have been far worse. So, seize the day, count your blessings and move on. You can survive a crisis only by dealing it with one day at a time. Don't add up all your problems in your mind and think you are finished. Compartmentalize your problems; put them in different buckets and project-manage them separately. This is how you live through uncertain times – making decisions when there are few or no options to choose from. You never see it this way when you are going through a crisis. But, unfailingly, every crisis leaves you stronger, wiser – and happy! ~ AVIS Viswanathan

Meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found - in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built ~ John Taylor Gatto

I love using unique names, so I go to a baby names site on the Internet and use the unique names. Sometimes my names have meanings such as 'strong', 'fire', and Phoenix which means dark red and is Greek. It's fun to think of a name meaning and matching it with a name. Even Frances means Victory. ~ Franny Armstrong

Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the former is done ~ William Graham Sumner

There is no single outside force imposing meaning on the events of your life. There is no evidence whatsoever that people's life events conform to some sort of divine plan or predestination. Life is, objectively, meaningless; given the size and scope of the universe and our tiny role within it, it's absurd to think that we might have any sort of cosmically vital role. ~ Armin Navabi

What I could really use is an older man. A mentor. One who could tell me how things fit together.
He would have asked me to do chores that I felt were meaningless. I would have been impatient and protested, but done them nonetheless. And eventually, after several months of hard labour, I would have realised that there was a deeper meaning behind it all, and that the master had a cunning plan all the time. ~ Erlend Loe

She raised an eyebrow. "You got something to say to me, Seaweed Brain?"

"You'd probably kick my butt."

"You know I'd kick your butt."

I brushed the cake off my hands. "When I was at the River Styx, turning invulnerable . . . Nico said I had to concentrate on one thing that kept me anchored to the world, that made me want to stay mortal."

Annabeth kept her eyes on the horizon. "Yeah?"

"Then up on Olympus," I said, "when they wanted to make me a god and stuff, I kept thinking-"

"Oh, you so wanted to."

"Well, maybe a little. But I didn't, because I thought-I didn't want things to stay the same for eternity, because things could always get better. And I was thinking . . ." My throat felt really dry.

"Anyone in particular?" Annabeth asked, her voice soft.

I looked over and saw that she was trying not to smile.

"You're laughing at me," I complained.

"I am not!"

"You are so not making this easy."

Then she laughed for real, and she put her hands
around my neck. "I am never, ever going to make things easy for you, Seaweed Brain. Get used to it."

When she kissed me, I had the feeling my brain was melting right through my body.
― Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian ~ Rick Riordan

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's happening everywhere; commercial and housing development, along with the road network needed to support it, is the single greatest pressure on natural landscapes in the United States, and by its very pervasiveness the hardest to control. Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres - meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those fifteen years. This isn't a trend, it's a juggernaut, and the worst may be yet to come. At this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming, and the total developed land in the United States will stand at a Texas-sized 174 million acres. Already, just the impervious covering we put on the land, the things like roads, sidewalks, and buildings we pave with asphalt or concrete, adds up to an area the size of Ohio.3 ~ Scott Weidensaul

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist ~ Salman Rushdie

Practicing silence means making a commitment to take a certain amount of time to simply Be. Experiencing silence means periodically withdrawing from the activity of speech. It also means periodically withdrawing from such activities as watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a book. If you never give yourself the opportunity to experience silence, this creates turbulence in your internal dialogue. ~ Deepak Chopra

Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling. ~ Richard Dawkins

I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups. ~ Arkady Volozh

The problem of journalism is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn't' witness it personally. They are entirely dependent on self-interested sources to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality. ~ Edward Jay Epstein

There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it. ~ Mark Doty

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.

That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.

Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expect ~ Seth Godin

It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings - the actor must be able to convert them into living terms. ~ Konstantin Stanislavski

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly. ~ Susan Sontag

I didn't know you owned clothes with colors."
"I have a few things that aren't black."
"Of course you do, darling. Only all the ones I've seen are very small, and I get to take them off with my teeth. You've trained me to salivate at the sight of color, like one of Pavlov's dogs. Your top is making me very hungry. ~ Ruthie Knox

The decision is already made. You can only choose to go with the tide or against it. ~ Haresh Sippy

Empathy is an essential part of living a life of meaning. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Learning to play the guitar is a combination of mental and motor skill acquisition. And to develop motor skill, repetition is essential ... Whenever musicians have trouble executing a passage, they generally tend to blame themselves for not having enough talent. Actually, all that's wrong is they don't know where their fingers are supposed to go ... you should learn the piece in your head before you play it. And when you do play it, play it so slow that there's no possibility of making a mistake. ~ Howard Roberts

Well, well, the world must turn upon its axis, And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails, And live and die, make love and pay our taxes, And as the veering winds shift, shift our sails. ~ Lord Byron

It's always been about the songs for us. It doesn't matter about all the image stuff. We're really about making songs that people can relate to, that we love, that they will love, that we will enjoy playing live. ~ Chuck Comeau

The immense importance of "adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour" (Titus ii. 10), and making it lovely and beautiful by our daily habits and tempers, has been far too much overlooked. ~ J.C. Ryle

At 23 it was all about acting. Today it's getting my kids to school, making sure that they've done their homework. I'm in my fifties, and I'm turning into a square. ~ Gary Oldman

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death. ~ Paul Kalanithi

Pursue Meaning, Not Happiness

Feeling happy is like feeling warm. It's a state of being that feels good. It might sound counterintuitive but focusing directly on pursuing happiness isn't always the best approach to increasing it. This parallels the idea that focusing on reducing anxiety isn't always the best way to decrease it.
What's an alternative to focusing on increasing your happiness? A better idea is focusing on pursuing things that feel meaningful. I'm not necessarily suggesting Mother Teresa-type activities. What gives you a sense of meaning could be anything from cooking for your friends to puttering away on projects in your garage.
Pursuing meaning rather than happiness helps you feel calmer when you're not feeling happy in a particular moment. It smooths out the emotional bumps that come with mistakes, failures, and disappointments. There's research showing that stress tends to be harmful only if you believe that it's harmful and that you can't cope with it. It's easier to believe in your capacity to cope with stress if the stress is part of the bigger picture of building a meaningful life.
Experiment: What makes for a meaningful life from your perspective? Skip over what you think you should answer and identify what's actually true for you. ~ Alice Boyes

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame. ~ Paul Haggis

The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive. ~ Elizabeth Gould Davis

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it. ~ M. Night Shyamalan

It was through this viewer that he got his first reply from Tralfamadore. The reply was written on Earth in huge stones on a plain in what is now England. The ruins of the reply still stand, and are known as Stonehenge. The meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above, is: Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I believe that preventing radicalisation is far more efficient than de-radicalisation, meaning stopping someone joining is a lot easier than trying to pull someone out once they've joined. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact you will die. ~ Derren Brown

In the meantime, I would drink, rest, and ponder the meaning of this mob. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I'm sure it is," she replied. Her expression turned fierce, making her look far different from the scattered teacher I knew.
"But listen to me when I say this. You are exceptional, taleneted, and brilliant young woman. Do not ever let anyone make you feel like you're less. Do not ever let anyone make you feel invisible. Do not let anyone-not even a teacher who constantly sends you for coffee-push you around." She put her glasses back on and began randomly lifting up pieces of papers. At last, she found a pen and grinned triumphantly.
"Now, then. What is your brother's name? ~ Richelle Mead