Meaningful Quotes - Page 49

We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. The lesson of Vietnam, I think, should be that never again will young Americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as possible.

Meaningful work, not welfare, is every American's hope, and we have a continuing responsibility to make those hopes a lasting reality.

When we're fully engaged in the present moment, no matter what we're doing, the question of meaning never seems to arise. It's because we feel fulfilled and that is inherently meaningful.

Yoga's ultimate intent is to achieve something far deeper and more meaningful than just a better body or less stress and tension. Its ultimate aim is to help you hear your soul's call so that you can be consistently guided to make the best decisions - the ones that serve your highest state of wellbeing. In the process of doing so, you will necessarily be made more whole and act in such a way as to support the larger world of which you are a part.

The search for a meaningful painting subject is a search for ourselves.

Now we're in a very different economy. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s American management started to do the right things. There was extraordinary investment in technology. The dominant questions now are less how to do it better, how to manage better, how to make the economy better, than how to have fuller and more meaningful lives. Because the irony is, now that we've come through this great transition, even though our organizations and our people are extraordinarily productive, many feel that the nonwork side of life is very thin.

He [Johnny Cash] always wanted to use his music to lift other people up, to say no matter how much trouble, there's hope. That was always his message in his songs. That's why he and [Bob] Dylan bonded so much, because they were both trying to do something meaningful.

Quincy [Jones] is one of the greatest world figures, of all-time. I mean he's up there with Muhammad Ali, as far as I'm concerned. His humanitarian work, his contribution to the world and music - he's really an amazing man. Even political divides don't affect his humanity. So, to me, that was extremely meaningful.

I write about things that tear me apart, and it's all very personal to me. It's funny to hear people disassemble the lyrics. If they get it wrong, it almost means more to me, because it's morphed into something that is meaningful to them.

When you are not sure on what to do, choose a life that is most meaningful to you and make it a habit.

The times I spent with my children in nature are among my most meaningful memories-and I hope theirs.

It takes time--loose, unstructured dreamtime-- to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, not because we intend it to shrink, but because time is consumed by multiple, invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play.

Life is too god damn short and you can't waste a minute of it.

The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

In 1946, Oxford University in England was offered large funds to create a new Institute of Human Nutrition. The University refused the funds on the ground that the knowledge of human nutrition was essentially complete, and that the proposed institution would soon run out of meaningful research projects.

Kafka was a complex character in a complex historical era. In order to understand him, you have to do more than cite facts. It is necessary to connect the facts in a meaningful way. His relationship to Judaism, to his father, to women, to literature - all of this is interconnected; and there are decisive moments in his life, in which such interactions suddenly become visible and can be experienced in an almost sensuous manner. It is these moments above all that I try to narrate dramatically.

My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?

Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.

The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.

The meaningful work and the meaningful relationships are, to me, comparable rewards. I think being on a mission to do something great is great, and to be on that mission with people who you have really meaningful relationships with not only provides both types of rewards, but it's mutually supportive. Because you can have tough love, but there's also the love part of that in terms of the caring for each other, and when you have the caring you can be tougher on each other. Some people describe it as an intellectual Navy Seals.

I think anybody who has had a long relationship and has had a really hard time letting go, wants to feel like it's not all for naught, and it's meaningful, because it makes you who you are.

If you share information widely, but you present that information in ways that fits your own view, you're actually still misrepresenting. So instead what you should do is figure out ways to build systems that allow people to experience and classify their information in ways that are meaningful for them.

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

I came to the conclusion that unless I found myself and became the change I wanted to see in the world - as Gandhi said - I couldn't contribute much, nor would there be anything fulfilling or meaningful in my life. So I went on a spiritual search.

The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.