Significance Quotes - Page 6

• Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.

  Carl Jung

  Letting Go, Ego, Midlife

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• These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Book, Philosophical

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.251, Modern Library

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• He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

  Alain de Botton

  Believe, Eye, Intelligent

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• Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

  Douglas Adams

  Successful, Reason, Understood

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.60, Pan Macmillan

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• And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Light, Pieces, Incidents

  Kazuo Ishiguro (2009). “Never Let Me Go”, p.71, Faber & Faber

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• I have no word of yours to assure me that our brief friendship held for you the same significance it held for me, but I must go on believing so. Every hope of the future is meaningless unless I have faith that you and I will share it together.

  Elizabeth George Speare

  Believe, Together, Goes On

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• In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Eye, Numbers

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• We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

  Alain de Botton

  Views, Quality, Divergent

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.9, Vintage

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• The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

  Thomas Mann

  Adventure, Sadness, Men

  Thomas Mann (1999). “Death in Venice, Tonio Kroger, and Other Writings: Thomas Mann”, p.115, A&C Black

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• Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Adventure, Order, Achieve

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• No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

  Zadie Smith

  Suicide, Beach, Ocean

  Zadie Smith (2000). “White teeth”

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• Love is the reflection of God's unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation.

  Meher Baba

  Reflection, Love Is, Diversity

  Meher Baba (1979). “The Narrow Lane”

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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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• 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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• The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

  Destiny, Losing, Individual

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1970). “Mies van der Rohe”

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• If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Character, Fate, Destiny

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.254, Penguin

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• What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.

  Harold Jeffreys

  Science, Use, Levels

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• There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

  Gilbert N. Lewis

  Real, Science, Ideas

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• I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures.

  Christiaan Barnard

  Heart, Sleep, Animal

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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• All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Memories, Emotional, Long

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.33, Harper Collins

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• The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Destruction, Scales, Planets

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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