Significance Quotes - Page 13

• I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow — there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance.

  Charlie Haden

  Beautiful, Yesterday, Age

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• It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence. (p. 4)

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Men, Order

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• No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

  T. S. Eliot

  Appreciation, Art, Poet

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

  Gregory Maguire

  Memories, Past, Mind

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• We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.

  James Redfield

  Optimistic, Challenges, Events

  James Redfield (1993). “The celestine prophecy: an adventure”, Atticus Press & Company (AL)

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• Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Men, Goal, Doe

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• works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

  Rebecca West

  Art, Wall, Doors

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• …I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

  William Faulkner

  Lying, Thinking, Light

  William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.90, W. W. Norton & Company

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• "If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stars, Distance, Home

  "The Great Gatsby". Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925.

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• Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana - and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.

  Rajneesh

  Song, Freedom, Blessed

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• Awareness is observation without choice, condemnation, or justification. Awareness is silent observation from which there arises understanding without the experiencer and the experienced. In this awareness, which is passive, the problem or the cause is given an opportunity to unfold itself and so give its full significance. In awareness there is no end in view to be gained, and there is no becoming, the 'me' and the 'mine' not being given the continuity.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Opportunity, Views, Giving

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1991). “The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, (1945-1948): The Observer Is the Abserved”, Krishnamurti Foundation of Amer

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• In 1847, two years before the greedy rush for gold began in California, the Mormons quietly began irrigating Utah's Salt Lake Valley. In a sense, they were the first American irrigators of any significance. And their knowledge about the art of applying water to land has spread throughout the world.

  Stuart Campbell

  Art, Rain, Utah

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• If our society were truly to appreciate the significance of children's emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up or parents having to struggle in situations which could not possibly nourish healthy growth.

  Stanley Greenspan

  Children, Growing Up, Struggle

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• In all humility and sincerity we must admit a power higher than ourselves from whom is derived a positive moral code that will give our lives significance and purpose. We also must remember once and for all that honesty, respect, and honor as such are not for sale on the market block. They are ingredients that you and I and all people should put into our daily lives.

  Delbert L. Stapley

  Honesty, Block, Integrity

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• What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Art, Lines, Ascending

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Illustrated)”, p.1029, Delphi Classics

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• she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Unbearable, Arms

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• The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Positive, Philosophical, Compassion

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.8, Publishdrive

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• Enthusiasm releases the drive to carry you over obstacles and adds significance to all you do.

  Norman Vincent Peale

  Motivational, Adversity, Enthusiasm For Life

  Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (2008). “Positive Thinking Every Day: An Inspiration For Each Day of the Year”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

  Diane Setterfield

  Stories, Cases, Disguise

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.269, Simon and Schuster

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• My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where
  the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry
  meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future.

  Pearl Bailey

  Food, Past, Bridges

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• I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simple, People, Feelings

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• Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance

  Leo Buscaglia

  Time, Giving, Focus

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• In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.

  Dean Koontz

  Rising, Moments, Drifting

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• An inferior sense of smell," Marcus said, as if absolutely nothing of significance had happened, "is distinct from being told that one smells unpleasant.

  Jim Butcher

  Smell, Said, Inferiors

  Jim Butcher (2008). “Princeps' Fury”, p.37, Penguin

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• Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

  Alan Watts

  Motivational, Reality, Missing

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