100 Meaningful Quotes

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.

These scientific studies countervail the influential claims of the Kants, Nietzsches, and Rands about the nature of human goodness. Compassion is not a blind emotions that catapults people pell-mell toward the next warm body that walks by. Instead, compassion is exquisitely attuned to harm and vulnerability in others. Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions. The kindness, sacrifice, and jen that make up healthy communities are rooted in a bundle of nerves that has been producing caretaking behavior for over 100 million years of mammalian evolution.

an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: 100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

Don't let your focus be so much on how many times you go on a date but how you can build into one another, share and carry each other's vision, complement each other, develop a deeper level of friendship; grow spiritually together and make the little things meaningful. It's beyond the 100% but more about how committed and dedicated you are daily. Love can only truly exist, when you become selfless and focus less on what is in it for you.

My desire to live a meaningful life was getting forestalled by the petty, day-to-day demands of all my stuff. As I stood in my garage, I realized that it was not just that all the stuff created a mess, requiring valuable time to clean up. That was true, but that wasn't the worst of it. I realized it was not the clutter, the over accumulation of things, but rather the things themselves that were taking my attention away from what mattered in my life. Camping gear was getting my attention, not being outside. Tools were taking up my time, not using them to be creative. Toys were distracting me from the fun of playing. My things were not doing what they were meant to do: serve a greater purpose than possession alone.

If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur,

The interesting paradox is that in order to truly put others first and give yourself in meaningful ways, you have to know how to put yourself first and be a little selfish where it counts. By making time for yourself and taking care of your own health first, you are putting yourself in the best position to continue being there for the people around you when they most need it. So by being selfish, you claw your sense of self back slowly, and you can use this newfound energy to be better at whatever you choose to spend it on. Hopefully you choose yourself, but even if you want to choose others, you’ll be better off if you are operating at 100%.

Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money. Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. [...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. [...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.”-Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, p.79, Lori Gottlieb “It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy. We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives. Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.

the secret to a meaningful new career was directly related to making people feel good about themselves.

Despite compelling new knowledge about learning, how the brain works, and what constitutes effective classroom groupings, classrooms have changed little over the past 100 years. We still assume that children of a given age are enough like each other that they can and should traverse the same curriculum in the same fashion. Further, schools act as though all children should finish classroom tasks as near to the same moment as possible, and that school year should be the same length for all learners. To this end, teachers generally assess student content mastery via tests based on specific chapters of the adopted textbook and summative tests at the end of designated marking periods. Teachers use the same grading system for all children of a given age and grade, whatever their starting point at the beginning of the year, with grades providing little if any indication of whether individual students have grown since the previous grading period or the degree to which students' attitudes and habits of mind contributed to their success or stagnation. Toward the end of the school year, schools administer standardized tests on the premise that all students of a certain age should have reached an average level of performance on the prescribed content by the testing date. Teachers, students, and schools that achieve the desired level of performance are celebrated; those that do not perform as desired are reprimanded, without any regard to the backgrounds, opportunities, and support systems available to any of the parties. Curriculum often has been based on goals that require students to accumulate and retain a variety of facts or to practice skills that are far removed from any meaningful context. Drill-and-practice worksheets are still a prime educational technology, a legacy of behaviorism rooted firmly in the 1930s. Teachers still largely run "tight ship" classes and are likely to work harder and more actively than their students much of the time.

One hundred seems to be a magic number when it comes to giving. In a study of more than two thousand Australian adults in their mid-sixties, those who volunteered between one hundred and eight hundred hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than one hundred or more than eight hundred hours annually. In another study, American adults who volunteered at least one hundred hours in 1998 were more likely to be alive in 2000. There were no benefits of volunteering more than one hundred hours. This is the 100-hour rule of volunteering. It appears to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining. A hundred hours a year breaks down to just two hours a week. Research shows that if people start volunteering two hours a week, their happiness, satisfaction, and self-esteem go up a year later. Two hours a week in a fresh domain appears to be the sweet spot where people make a meaningful difference without being overwhelmed or sacrificing other priorities. It’s also the range in which volunteering is most likely to strike a healthy balance, offering benefits to the volunteer as well as the recipients.

Social researcher Robin Dunbar contended that we can’t have meaningful interactions with more than 100 to 200 people at any one time in our lives.

Given it costs no more to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, we believe that DeFi will replace all meaningful centralized financial infrastructure in the future.

minimized friction and maximized value to users. Because it costs no more at an organization level to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, DeFi proponents believe that all meaningful financial infrastructure will be replaced by smart contracts, which can provide more value to a larger group of users. Anyone can simply pay the flat fee to use the contract and benefit from the innovations of DeFi.

This book is about envisioning your life together with love, care, and mindfulness. It is about skillfully balancing the crazy wisdom of love with the grounded practicality of making a life together. It is about the middle road, the constant, meaningful interplay between these two poles, loving a person and loving the life you create together. Strong marriages exist here, between the fire of intimacy and the ground of pragmatism.

A highly respected pair of researchers put the odds that such an effort (in this case involving a hypothetical strain of a novel influenza) could create a dangerous pathogen that would accidentally escape from a lab and trigger a pandemic at 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 per lab year.64 This was a meaningful risk. The US government imposed a moratorium on gain-of-function studies in 2014. No such restrictions were imposed in China. The US moratorium was later lifted by the NIH in 2017 and gain of function experiments continued including one widely cited study that was done by US researchers in collaboration with the WIV.65

Changing your perspective on things that cause you suffering, Practicing gratitude daily, Identifying your core values and living by them, and Pursuing meaningful goals.

I value this relationship. I intend to work as hard as humanly possible and do my best to give you a terrific return on your investment. Your trust in me is meaningful. But if typical startup odds come true, there is at least a 50 percent chance this business will fail and I will lose all your money. I need to be 100 percent sure that if that happens our relationship will survive as it is more important to me than the funds. Can you give me that assurance?

For with her, there isn’t eternal support, kind words, sweet notes, meaningful kisses, gentle reminders, someone to think about during chick flicks, a well of intensely personal advice, a loving ear or a willing heart. She will try to convince you that by jumping in your ride and heading out tonight riding solo is YOLO, but know that the ice cream, Ambien, and Netflix cocktails can’t drown the innate desire of a human to care about and be cared about on a plane that is higher than platonic friendship. Ah yes, what she offers pales in comparison to what she never can give

The reason for this increase in temporary hiring, as you’ve probably guessed, is employers’ desire to keep their costs down. In the face of the global economy and online competition, employers across the country (and, indeed, across the world) have developed a budget-friendly strategy, hiring only when they need help, and letting the employee go as soon as they don’t need that help.11 Not to mention that part-timers don’t have to be paid any benefits or granted paid vacation time. Indeed, 20 to 30 percent of those employed by the Fortune 100 now have short-term jobs, either as independent contractors or as temp workers, and this figure is predicted to rise to 50 percent during the next six years.

Listening truthfully is not defensive. Even if you do not like this information, you should listen to it instead of responding immediately. Listening attentively is less like a technique, it is more like an attitude. A skier spends 100% of his attention when encountering obstacles, and he will never be distracted to think about what he wants to say to his partner later. In the same way, as an active listener, you give 100% of your attention to another person, and you will not want to blurt out what you think. In this way, you get rid of preconceived notions and open your mind to create a more meaningful and effective dialogue.

We start by picking a problem that’s narrow and meaningful. Then, solve it. And, like we just learned, when we solve one problem, a new problem reveals itself. Here comes the important part- if we can solve that new problem with our core offer, we’ve got a winner. This is because we solve this new problem in exchange for money. That’s it. Don’t overthink it.

Not everyone knows what it means to work hard. By which I mean, the pleasure you get from working hard is a reward reserved exclusively for those who know who they are and have found meaningful work. If what I’ve said so far describes you, my reader, then cut yourself some slack and appreciate your hard-working nature.

dream of living the simple life of bare minimums and absolute essentials. And I want to invest all else in doing the kind of work that I find meaningful and engaging.

I dream of living the simple life of bare minimums and absolute essentials. And I want to invest all else in doing the kind of work that I find meaningful and engaging.

Our economics, social life, politics and schools have insisted that having more toys is better than having fewer toys; that buying stuff is good for us; that we have to keep up with or exceed others in our consumption; that a high-paying job can take the place of meaningful work; that low-paying meaningless jobs that demean our humanity are better than none and we should be grateful for them because they will turn us into decent citizens; and that a free market has the same powers as a just God. But capitalism rests ultimately not on innovation or entrepreneurship or brains or even a free market - those are just stories we like to tell ourselves because they make those who are successful look good. At its base, industrial capitalism's success rests on exploitation of resources, racism, child abuse, sexism and war. But even more than all these, contemporary capitalism rests on consumption: government and corporate consumption of resources, technology, and scientific research, and citizen consumption of market goods. We are asked to consume not only material goods, but ideas, policies, whole worldviews that are presented with all the persuasive skills and battering psychological hype that can be bought. We are under assault, being laid siege by hype: corporate hype, political hype, military hype, educational hype, commercial hype. And as our civil rights have declined in recent years, freedom has come to mean the freedom to choose among 16 brand names of one product. This is the harvest of a culture so bent on growth with all possible speed that it will pour 100,000 chemicals in the earth and atmosphere, into our lakes, groundwaters and oceans, before it has a clue about the long-term effects of a single one of them.

When I talk about kindness in business, a few people scoff. They say, “Steve Jobs and the leaders at Apple created a pressure-cooker environment but it produced category-defining products that people love and obsess over.” That is the point — the results are not worth the cost, because there is an alternative. The goal of TRM is to create a kind, sustainable, and fulfilling experience for everyone. Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only obsessive egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense. People are the most important resource for any business, and people — whether they are employees, vendors, or customers — respond best to kindness, respect, humility, and empathy. You never know what other people are going through in their lives. Many of us are under great stress, especially when business cycles shift and economic pressures build. Others are struggling in relationships. When everyone feels valued and heard, they are more likely to show up fully and bring their best each day. Kindness is the alternative to the unnecessary “business is war” analogies that are not only tiresome but borderline offensive. It is the opposite of the “outcome justified the means” mentality that drives many entrepreneurs to consider sacrificing everything (including their morals) to build $100 million businesses in seven years. It’s success without the collateral damage. This aspect of TRM creates a healthy framework for daily interactions and long-term goals and helps people avoid burnout even when they put in heavy hours over long periods of time. We are all naturally optimistic, motivated to be better tomorrow than we are today. A kind organization understands that and leverages it. Your goal is to build a product that lasts, but to do that, you must also build an organization, a work environment, and a fabric of relationships that last too. People will remain engaged and focused on achievements when they are doing something meaningful that they care about in an organization that lets them live the way they want to live. “Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense.

About the same number of people die each year from medical errors as from automobile accidents. Heart disease and cancer kill the most people in the United States, more than 500,000 each year. But stroke and lung diseases are each responsible for about 100,000 deaths each year — and scandalously, so are medical errors. Medical errors are notoriously difficult to track, given our litigious society, so we really do not know how many deaths that statisticians attribute to cancer or heart disease were also related to medical errors. But given the high likelihood that errors are implicated in some of these deaths, it is possible that medical errors could be the third leading cause of death in the United States.

The most common ways we get probability wrong are: We overestimate certainty. When we do this, it doesn’t even occur to us that a decision has any risk associated with it. We assume if we’re buying a house, prices will only go up. Or people move to Hollywood because they believe they are better looking or more talented than most others. The Antars never thought they’d get caught. They believed Sam would always outsmart the SEC and IRS. The other criminals I interviewed didn’t consider getting caught a possibility either. We overestimate the risk of unlikely events. We assume a remote and terrible event is more likely than it is. This is why many people are more afraid of flying than driving, even if they know the odds of dying in a car accident are higher. A plane crash is especially horrific, which is why we put higher odds on its happening. We assume correlations that don’t exist. After being dealt a few good hands in poker, you could think you’re on a roll and that the next hand is bound to be good too. In fact, each hand you are dealt has nothing to do with the last. When it comes to crime, getting away with something once, or many times, creates an illusion you’ll get away with it the next time. The Antars assumed that because they pulled off tax evasion, they could also get away with securities fraud. Wrong again, and their earlier success led them to take bigger risks to continue the fraud. We put a big weight on very likely or unlikely events and put almost no weight on anything that happens in between. The difference between a 0 percent and 5 percent probability feels huge because it creates possibility. The difference between 100 percent and 95 percent also feels meaningful because it creates or eliminates risk. But the difference between 50 percent and 55 percent barely factors into our decisions. The closer we get to certainty, the more we weight a probability, but mathematically, a 5 percent increase should be given equal weight no matter what.

Today you are encouraged to take action. Thinking and doing are two very different things. Success never comes to look for you while you wait around thinking about it. You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. Knowledge is basically useless without action. Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who work on meaningful goals. Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the courage to build your life around your answer. Prune nonessential commitments. Eliminate as much as you possibly can of everything else. No wasted time, no fluff, no regrets. And remember, if you wait until you feel 100% ready to begin, you’ll likely be waiting the rest of your life. So challenge yourself to be who you know you are capable of being. Challenge yourself to follow through – to live what you preach, to walk your talk!

Our concern,” Jimmy wrote in the DU brochure, is with how our city has been disintegrating socially, economically, politically, morally and ethically. We are convinced that we cannot depend upon one industry or any large corporation to provide us with jobs. It is now up to us—the citizens of Detroit—to put our hearts, our imaginations, our minds, and our hands together to create a vision and project concrete programs for developing the kinds of local enterprises that will provide meaningful jobs and income for all citizens. To engage Detroiters in the creation of this vision, DU embarked on a campaign for open government in the city, issuing a series of leaflets calling on citizens to examine the whole chain of developer-driven megaprojects with which Young had tried and failed to revive the city (including Poletown and the People Mover) and to assume responsibility for envisioning and implementing alternative roads of development based on restoring neighborhoods and communities. During the debate over casino gambling Young had challenged his opponents to come up with an alternative, accusing us of being naysayers without any solutions of our own. Jimmy welcomed the challenge. There was nothing he liked better than using crisis and breakdown as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. His forte was devising solutions that were visionary and at the same time so down-to-earth that people could almost taste them. For more than fifteen years he had been writing and talking about the crisis developing in our cities and the need to redefine work, especially for the sake of our young people. In October 1986, at a meeting in Oakland, California, which the Bay Area NOAR sponsored to present “a vision of 21st century neighborhoods and communities,” Jimmy had declared that it was now “idealistic” to expect the government or corporations to do the work that is needed to keep up our communities and to provide for our elementary safety and security. Multinational corporations and rapid technological development have turned our cities into graveyards. “Efficiency in production,” he argued, “can no longer be our guiding principle because it comes at the price of eliminating human creativity and skills and making millions of people expendable.” He continued: “The residue of the last 100 years of rapid technological development is alienation, hopelessness, self-hate and hate for one another, and the violence which has created a reign of terror in our inner cities.

the goal of GAAP is to ensure that companies’ financial statements are prepared using a consistent set of rules and assumptions so that they can be compared to those of another company in a meaningful way.

21 As environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson puts it, “The Anthropocene presents novel challenges for living a meaningful life.”22 Historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed that global warming “calls us to visions of the human that neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever contemplated.”23 Whether we are talking about ethics or politics, ontology or epistemology, confronting the end of the world as we know it dramatically challenges our learned perspectives and ingrained priorities. What does consumer choice mean compared against 100,000 years of ecological catastrophe? What does one life mean in the face of mass death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful decisions in the shadow of our inevitable end? These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They cannot be graphed or quantified. They are philosophical problems par excellence. If, as Montaigne asserted, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age, for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene.24 The rub now is that we have to learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.