Meaningless Inspirational Quotes

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So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie)
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
We’re on this planet for too short a time. And at the end of the day, what’s more important? Knowing that a few meaningless figures balanced—or knowing that you were the person you wanted to be?
Sophie Kinsella
Stop giving meaningless praise and start giving meaningful action.
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
Death is only meaningless if it does not change us, Vis.
James Islington (The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1))
There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.
Tao Lin (Eeeee Eee Eeee)
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.
Leo Tolstoy
There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.
John H. Groberg (The Other Side of Heaven)
Many things that don't really mean so much of anything, are wonderful.
C. JoyBell C.
The transitoriness of our existence in now way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities.
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
It is what it is because you let it be so.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Life is a misery, death an uncertainty. Suppose it steals suddenly upon me, in what state shall I leave this world? When can I learn what I have here neglected to learn? Or is it true that death will cut off and put an end to all care and all feeling? This is something to be inquired into. But no, this cannot be true. It is not for nothing, it is not meaningless that all over the world is displayed the high and towering authority of the Christian faith. Such great and wonderful things would never have been done for us by God, if the life of the soul were to end with the death of the body. Why then do I delay? Why do I not abandon my hopes of this world and devote myself entirely to the search for God and for the happy life?
Augustine of Hippo (Confessions)
So that's it. I've told you everything I know. Think clearly and think for yourself. Learn to use language to express those thoughts. Love somebody with all your heart. And with everyone, whether you love them or not, find out if you can be helpful. But really, it's even simpler than that. After all this time, and all these talks in public and in private, I think I get it now. If I were taking my friend Arnold's suggestion and spoke from my deathbed, I think I know what I'd say. I see now that I had my meaning all along, I just had to notice it. The meaning of life... is life. Not noticing life is what's meaningless, even down to the last second.
Alan Alda (Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself)
Education is meaningless without manners
Benny Bellamacina (Piddly Poems for Children, v.2)
Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
After you have suffered great losses and known much pain, it is not cowardice to wish to live henceforth with a minimum of suffering. And one form of heroism, about which few if any films will be made, is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness is justified, having the strength to persevere even when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless.
Dean Koontz (The City (The City, #1))
I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.
Corazón Cojuangco Aquino
Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this — and out of nothing — can still count the hairs of my head.
Madeleine L'Engle (Miracle on 10th Street and Other Christmas Writings)
Know that mumblings and pleadings are far from meaningless for if they come from the heart they are, in fact, prayers.
Olive Rose Steele (And When We Pray (Suggestions and Prayers for Living in Spirit))
When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
It's meaningless to just live, it's meaningless to just fight, cause i wanna win and survive !!!!
Tite Kubo (Bleach, Vol. 1)
Quotes are empty and meaningless. It is how they are used that gives them purpose, how the person repeating those words gives them meaning. Good quotes do not offer the author immortality. Instead, they give the author limitless rebirths on the tongues of the masses.
Andy Clark
Consider the possibility that many of the things you hear and say are utter nonsense and meaningless repetitions of noise.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper...there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people...but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
sometimes you care and love people but they didn't realize it. they realize it, when you stop caring or loving them but then, everything is meaningless
Qasim Habib
Sometimes, something meaningless occurs, somewhere with meaning.
F. Thomas Vincent
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
What I feel inspired to write today is this deep emotional dissatisfaction with the reality of our times--corruption of government--fake people--sick values--and unconscious people living meaningless lives
Eustice Conway
Meaningful pain is better than meaningless pleasure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Though it is unreal it is not meaningless
George Orwell (1984)
We are all one. Everything is meaningless, and yet at the same time meaningful. Everything matters and doesn’t matter just as much," Wisdom said and looked beyond time.(Nakoma, by Gala.J)
Gala.J (Nakoma, a spirit's destiny)
I have finally figured out the meaning of life: there's no such thing. And that's a beautiful thing, because that means that WE get to choose it ourselves. Life has no meaning besides the meaning you give it. You are indeed the author of your destiny. So why not write a book worth reading?
Dean Bokhari
A lesson without pain is meaningless. That’s because no one can gain without sacrificing something. But by enduring that pain and overcoming it, he shall obtain a powerful, unmatched heart. A fullmetal heart.
Edward Elric
Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform. (unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions)
William Gaddis
I always knew a good man should do no bad deeds, but it never occurred to me that a good man must do good deeds. He cannot just sit back and do nothing. He cannot just relax and let things happen around him. He must act or his faith is meaningless, mere words or thoughts.
Aleksandra Layland (Ansgar: The Struggle of a People. The Triumph of the Heart.)
A person with money who chooses to spend it on you, takes little effort and is meaningless. However, a person with no time who manages to spend what little they have on you... this means everything and should appreciated.
Mark W. Boyer
If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT. Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.
Robyn Davidson
one of the most painful things in life is to be considered as meaningless in an environment where you think you are truly meaningful
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah (Distinctive Footprints Of Life: where are you heading towards?)
knowledge without creativity is useless creativity without knowledge is meaningless
shashidhar sa
Love without loyalty is the most meaningless gift that you could give to anyone.
Mitta Xinindlu
Everyone whirled around her, entranced by the stories in which they recognized themselves, but in the stories they were also more than themselves and it always felt at the end fulfilled, not meaningless and empty like life can sometimes feel.
Francesca Lia Block
He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn't she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent superficial letters? And if she did say it - would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.
Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)
The mind is a storehouse with great capacity, but is often filled with dubious knowledge and meaningless trivialities. In truth, much of this - though at times interesting and entertaining - is of insignificant value.
Stevenson Willis (The Proverbs of Leadership: Principles for Leading Your People to the Pinnacle of Greatness)
There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.
Adrian Tan
You're the insane one. You don't even love the world you created. So how can you expect us to love and respect you? An endless repetition of natural destruction and stupid, meaningless wars. Because we don't understand it, we have no way to stop it. We may be stupid and not know what to do... But we fight to move forward towards that which we think is right. Not just sticking to the arbitrary boundaries you created. We make lots of mistakes, and get hurt... But we keep believing in miracles. Looking for a truth we can't yet see. We do it our own way. Because we believe our lives mean something.
Kaori Yuki (Angel Sanctuary, Vol. 20)
What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.
David Levithan (Two Boys Kissing)
Life is meaningless until we learn to use the power of divine love and see the divine in every event and in every beauty.
Debasish Mridha
Love without loyalty is selfish. If your love comes without loyalty, I don't want it. In fact, love without loyalty is the most meaningless gift that you could give to anyone.
Mitta Xinindlu
Words become meaningless if you don’t tell your truth and they become weapons if you try to tell someone else theirs.
Jem Lester (Shtum)
Without our sufferings, we would never appreciate God’s great rescues. We would never really learn to trust Him instead of ourselves. So while suffering hurts, it’s not meaningless
Walk Thru the Bible (The One Year Daily Moments of Strength: Inspiration for Men)
Lots of people have a “timeline” in mind for their life: the age when they want to get married, have kids, retire. The best advice I ever got was to forget all about this schedule. Why try to squeeze your life into a totally artificial construct based on meaningless rules? You’ll end up doing stupid things, like randomly marrying the guy you happen to be dating when you’re 29 because your self-imposed wedding deadline is age 30. Despite people hotly debating the “correct” age to tick off life’s milestones, it’s different for everyone – there’s no right or wrong answer.
Rosie Blythe (The Princess Guide to Life)
Usually I take this opportunity to say something inspiring, about how my illness has changed me for the better and given me a clear purpose in life for both the work I do and the person I want to be. While all these things are true, the fact is that sometimes I'm in a physical state where I just don’t have it in me to be inspirational. And that’s all right – inspirational words are meaningless without the context of genuine human struggle.
Michael Bihovsky
During the crash and burn, I began to burn from cranial crown to flat sole, for meaning and understanding. Every concept, psychological perceptions with hardened pathways, everything that registered as inherited from the communal was starting to dissolve into meaninglessness. The foundational tenets, the pre-established belief systems, instilled sustenance systems tended by both family and extended communal began to dissolve, first as trivial, and then as untenable to my being without validation from me. If my life was worth anything, I choose to live the best life for me. So I entered what I call The Blank State.
Dew Platt (Failure&solitude)
Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society — models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation — their behavior unaltered.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
The only thing that belongs to us is our LIFE.Yet,we waste it in the pursuit of meaningless things that will never belong to us.
R.V.M.
Stories are the lies that we need to make sense of our world and for our existence not to be meaningless.
Neil Gaiman
A promise is just an empty shell filled with words, and words are weightless.
Lik Hock Yap Ivan
You will never be able to do anything of true value without Christ. Apart from Him all things are meaningless.
Pauline Seaport
It's meaningless to just live. It's meaningless to just fight. I want to win.
Tite Kubo
Meaningless thoughts come at a price.
Rapha Ram (U-Day (Memory Full, #1))
Intentions are meaningless without action.
Frank Sonnenberg (Leadership by Example: Be a role model who inspires greatness in others)
Without death, life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?
Seth Grahame-Smith
The addictive nature of social media and technology, send kids into a pitfall of: -Dopamine Hits -Distractions -Meaningless Actions
Ethan Castro
Choosing the good of all is always your highest calling, even if that means people don’t like you for it. Being liked is meaningless if real love is not at the heart of your purpose.
Sean Patrick Brennan (The Angel's Guide to Taking Human Form)
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
Bertrand Russell
What a shame it would be, if upon death, one who lived his life following his religion, were to find out that there is no Heaven and no Hell and that all souls just go out and back to the places where they came from, finally free from the monsters that hung onto their backs while they were in this world! And what a shame it would be, if upon death, one who lived life with no thought of her own soul, were to find out that some souls go to some place wonderful and some souls go to some place horrible! But what a shame it would be, for anyone, to live a life here on this Earth full of fear, void of freedom and happiness, meaningless and empty, due to either the probability of Heaven and Hell or the absence thereof! So what is really true, is that you and I have bones in our bodies and have flesh under our skin and we ought to live this life right here in such a way that creates Heaven on Earth and puts Hell far away.
C. JoyBell C.
It's not the suffering that wears you down and defeats you, it's the meaningless suffering. There's no limit to what human beings will put up with if they think it all has a purpose; there's no limit to what they'll sacrifice
William John Watkins
Everything that you thought had meaning: every hope, dream, or moment of happiness. None of it matters as you lie bleeding out on the battlefield. None of it changes what a speeding rock does to a body, we all die. But does that mean our lives are meaningless? Does that mean that there was no point in our being born? Would you say that of our slain comrades? What about their lives? Were they meaningless? They were not! Their memory serves as an example to us all! The courageous fallen! The anguished fallen! Their lives have meaning because we the living refuse to forget them! And as we ride to certain death, we trust our successors to do the same for us! Because my soldiers do not buckle or yield when faced with the cruelty of this world! My soldiers push forward! My soldiers scream out! My soldiers RAGE!
Hajime Isayama (進撃の巨人 20 [Shingeki no Kyojin 20])
Dare not to criticise self, lift yourself up and set the boundaries for your worth. Speak kindly to self and hand your worries over to the wind,if you are here; you are successful already, start believing in your story, the destination will be meaningless if the journeys never been truly lived
Nikki Rowe
Aimlessness isn’t purposelessness. Not to me. Aimlessness isn’t meaningless. Quite the contrary. Aimlessness isn’t absence from life, it is full-bodied presence in it. To wander aimlessly is to move through the world without the conceit that we actually know what is coming next. That is, to move through the world with grace.
Toby Israel (Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel)
I think of published poets that you could know of...I think [Rainer Maria Rilke] probably has the most great published poems of any poet [...] but Rilke himself was an asshole. If you look at his biography, he was probably misogynist; he was a liar, a cheat; he was a terrible father; he was selfish; he put people down; he had no consideration for anyone [...] yet, he transcends that in his greatest poems. There's that ineffable, spiritual quality - that he himself couldn't reach! But somewhere underneath that reptilian exterior, that asshole exterior of Rainer Maria Rilke, there was some good that came through – like these little sunbursts coming through clouds – that had that moment. And he'd write the Duino Elegies, he'd write the New Poems, and somewhere, that came through. And that's an amazing thing: you can have a lot of great people who are great individuals, who are loving and caring – and they can't do that. And that's not to say that their lives are meaningless, but they will never be able to affect anyone past the propinquity of their existence. They are never going to be able to affect someone in China; they are never going to be able to affect someone in 2132 the way Rilke can. And that specialness needs to be acknowledged; that specialness needs to be upheld; it needs to be rewarded, and people need to say, 'Goddamn – that's a good thing! It's a good thing that people make art!
Dan Schneider
What do you even want a double pendulum for?” “It’s a comforting metaphor,” Draco answers. “I’d like to have one on my desk.” “You find chaos comforting?” “I find the certainty of uncertainty comforting. Existence is meaningless, no one knows what’s going on, and we are all eternally at the mercy of an uncaring universe. I just find it easier to embrace it than to hide behind our abstract concepts of order like they can really protect me.
Tessa Crowley (Chaos Theory)
The awfulness of sudden death and the glory of heaven stunned me! The thing that had been mystery at twilight, lay clear, pure, open in the rosy hue of dawn. Out of the gates of the morning poured a light which glorified the palaces and pyramids, purged and purified the afternoon's inscrutable clefts, swept away the shadows of the mesas, and bathed that broad, deep world of mighty mountains, stately spars of rock, sculptured cathedrals and alabaster terraces in an artist's dream of color. A pearl from heaven had burst, flinging its heart of fire into this chasm. A stream of opal flowed out of the sun, to touch each peak, mesa, dome, parapet, temple and tower, cliff and cleft into the new-born life of another day. I sat there for a long time and knew that every second the scene changed, yet I could not tell how. I knew I sat high over a hole of broken, splintered, barren mountains; I knew I could see a hundred miles of the length of it, and eighteen miles of the width of it, and a mile of the depth of it, and the shafts and rays of rose light on a million glancing, many-hued surfaces at once; but that knowledge was no help to me. I repeated a lot of meaningless superlatives to myself, and I found words inadequate and superfluous. The spectacle was too elusive and too great. It was life and death, heaven and hell.
Zane Grey (The Last of the Plainsmen)
Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
Our brain is funny. Its primary function is to keep us safe from danger. It has us believe that in order to insulate us from such, we must work harder, meaner, and longer to stay ahead of potential competitors who can rip the rug out from under us at any moment. But the reality is, when we are well rested and reflective rather than reactive, we put ourselves in a better place; a place that is well insulated from the ultimate danger of meaningless or, even worse, toxic, self-destructive work.
Charles F. Glassman (Brain Drain - The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life)
Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy. Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had become a crutch that was distracting us from engaging, in a meaningful way, with our problems. We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals. Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase. Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning. Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself. Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless. Managers scour books and magazines looking for greater understanding but settle instead for adopting a new terminology, thinking that using fresh words will bring them closer to their goals. When someone comes up with a phrase that sticks, it becomes a meme, which migrates around even as it disconnects from its original meaning. To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
Padma, My darling. I have told you countless times that all these rites and rituals are meaningless. I will show you what God is. Just Look into the eyes of your mother Padma, and what you see is God. Look into the heart of a noble man, and what you see is God. Look at the lotus feet of your teacher, and what you see is God. God, as we know, is just a manifestation of our innate insecurity and fear of mortality. I do bow down dutifully before all Gods, but I really do not expect much from anyone. As far as I am concerned, I am yet to see any God in this big, wide and cruel world, except in the eyes of my mother and in feet of my teachers.
Biju Vasudevan (Kamayakshipuram)
I like how Dallas Willard put it: “We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it,” he said, “or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.” So perhaps a better question than “Do I believe in miracles?” is “Am I acting like I do?” Am I including the people who are typically excluded? Am I feeding the hungry and caring for the sick? Am I holding the hands of the homeless and offering help to addicts? Am I working to break down religious and political barriers that marginalize ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and people with disabilities? Am I behaving as though life is more than a meaningless, chaotic mess, that there is some order in the storm?
Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
So get up, pretty woman! And from your beautifully shaped body don’t be ashamed For we are meant to be different, Rounded shapes and squared We come in a small, medium and a large size And to each there is still a wide range This is to create a beautiful portrait for the eyes And we are not supposed to please the “media-thinking” and change! So woman up! Whether your size is infinity-X large or infinity-X Small In love with “you” you should fall Don’t let them and their meaningless words or shallow looks Make you lose it all As to this nature you belong, The beach, the mountains, the oceans And the colorful life this mother earth has to give So embrace this with your body and soul No matter how they evolve… For as long as you live!
Abeer Allan
Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution. They lacked the ambition of universality. Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination. But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality. And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism. They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force. The consequences were not long in appearing.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
I believe that 'social justice' will ultimately be recognized as a will-o'-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization- an attempt to satisfy a craving inherited from the traditions of the small group but which is meaningless in the Great Society of free men. Unfortunately, this vague desire which has become one of the strongest bonds spurring people of good will to action, not only is bound to be disappointed. This would be sad enough. But, like most attempts to pursue an unattainable goal, the striving for it will also produce highly undesirable consequences, and in particular lead to the destruction of the indispensable environment in which the traditional moral values alone can flourish, namely personal freedom. —F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976
Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
They think it's what we need to hear, but it's the opposite. Inviting glamorous people to school, asking them to parade their glamorous lives onstage, getting them to inspire us with their message that anything is possible if only we believe. Dream. Reach for the stars. Well, no thanks. That's not for me. I'm not going to get there, and neither are most people that I know, and that's fine by me. It is. It really is. When did it stop being fine for everyone else? The normal stuff. Sunday dinners and, I don't know , taking a walk in the park and listening to music and working in an ordinary job for an ordinary wage that will allow you to maybe go on holiday once a year, and really look forward to it too because you're are not a greedy bastard wanting more, more, more all the time. That's who should be doing a talk at school. Seriously. Show me someone happy with a life like that, because it's enough. It should be enough. All that other stuff is meaningless.
Annabel Pitcher (Silence is Goldfish)
After all, we are changed by life … it puts its teeth in us, it leaves its handprints and marks and scars on us. And as much as we try to ignore those things, in the end they make us who we are. For good or for bad, we are changed and touched and broken and mended and scarred. And those marks (inside and out) tell a story. They tell our story. Sometimes we hide them away, those injuries done by others (or, worse, by ourselves). We conceal them up our sleeves or jammed deep into pockets. We try to pretend that they never hurt at all. But it’s a strange and meaningless action. Anyone who has lived would almost certainly understand and maybe even reveal their own hidden defects they’ve been hiding from the world as well. The world feels safer somehow if we share our pain. It becomes more manageable. And by sharing our pain, we inspire others to share theirs. We are so much less alone if we learn to wear our imperfections proudly, like tarnished jewelry that still shines just as brightly.
Jenny Lawson (Broken (in the best possible way))
And so, you find yourself back to where you always go, back to the surface, a straight back, sky above, clear as a sleeping ocean, shaded with your favorite blue, calm enough to lay still, the perfect weight, an extra hand would drown you. A heart so full of water and mind only concerned with dreams, only concerned with you. You find yourself home, finding shelter in everything you love, finding a destination in everything you want, clearing up space for what you really should want, washing away false accusations and false desires as if they were nothing, making them nothing. Now you are back to looking in what makes you, you. Finding your heart in everything that can't hurt him, and finally apologizing for leaving him alone outside of the water for 3 months without you. You find yourself home, that hug you needed is meaningless, it wouldn't have felt good, and it's a good thing we haven't really tried it. But let me tell you, once you get the courage to write, be thankful you have an inspiration.
Mennah al Refaey
Most modern logicians would classify 15, "God has spoken to me" as equally meaningless in the above sense. Partially, I agree. Partially, I think it more accurate, and compassionate, to regard this as a badly-formulated self-referential statement. That is, just as "Beethoven is better than Mozart" is a bad formulation of the self-referential proposition 'Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me,"it may be most helpful to consider "God has spoken to me" as a bad formulation of the correct proposition, "I have had such an awe-inspiring experience that the best model I know to describe it is to say that God spoke to me." I think this is helpful because the proposition is only false if the person is deliberately lying, and because it reminds us that similar experiences are often stated within other paradigms, such as "I became one with the Buddha-mind" or "I became one with the Universe." These have different philosophical meanings than "God has spoken to me," but probably refer to the same kind of etic (non-verbal) experiences.
Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
There is another call, the one that arrives the day when what once worked no longer does. Sometimes people need a shock; sometimes a tocsin call. It is time for a wake-up call. A man is fired from a job; a child runs away from home; ulcers overtake the body. The ancients called this “soul loss.” Today, the equivalent is the loss of meaning or purpose in our lives. There is a void where there should be what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “juice and joy.” The heart grows cold; life loses its vitality. Our accomplishments seem meaningless. As Tolstoy wrote in his Confessions, “Nothing ahead except ruins.” We seem to be in the thick of the forest without a road. “What, then, must we do?” The long line of myths, legends, poetry, and stories throughout the world tell us that it is at that moment of darkness that the call comes. It arrives in various forms—an itch, a fever, an offer, a ringing, an inspiration, an idea, a voice, words in a book that seem to have been written just for us—or a knock. THE KNOCK The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away. I'm looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. —Robert Pirsig
Phil Cousineau (The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred)
I'm going to get lecture-y for a second and add that I think the entire idea of tops and bottems, especially when coming from straight people who fetishize gay people, is an attempt to place some sort of hetero world over gay people. "Oh your're a bottom, so you're the woman." Gay guys who are strictly tops or bottoms tend to embrace this idea, too. Being a top only means you're "manly" or whatever because not being manly is considered bad by like adults and TV and stuff. Gay guys can buy into that crap just as easy as straight people. Whenever you see masc for masc on Grindr or whatever, what you're seeing is someone saying," I don't want people to think I'm like a woman, and I don;t want people to think that you're like a woman because people will think less of us." Sure people have preference but these ideas of masculine and feminine are kind of meaningless. I wear make-up. I think I'm pretty manly! We're all told this crap all the time, but you can reject it. Instead you're enforcing the idea that there is masculine and there is feminine, and that masculine is, for some unexplained reason, better. Finally, and this should probably be clear after the last bit, but you cant tell a top or a bottom or what a person's preferences are just by looking at him! Big, harry, muscled men love taking it up the ass. Trust me, I know. And slim, make-up wearing types, we love to f@$%. And in my case, get f@$%ed, too. Like I said, versatility is the best. So, in summary, it's wrong to assume all gay guys are having anal sex all the time. And it's ridiculous and offensive and stereotyping and hurtful to think that those who are penetrated are girly and those who penetrate are manly, something you've been doing. ... You're email is more like a mean joke you tell your friends, and I think that is because secretly you hate the way you're always being told what a girl should be like. And when you see a gay guy blurring the gender lines a little, like me, you're jealous of him. You want to put him in his place. You want to say, "he's not a man." Because if you can't blur those gender lines without being told you're gross or wrong, then you want to make sure that anyone who does cross those gender lines gets punished the way you would. But you shouldn't be punishing gay guys. You should be braking down the barriers that keep you from being who YOU want to be!
Lev A.C. Rosen (Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts))
What did Strauss mean by philosophy? Not what it was commonly understood to be. Philosophers were not to be found teaching in colleges and universities around the country because instructors in philosophy departments were no more likely to be true philosophers than instructors in art departments were to be true artists. Philosophy wasn’t an academic discipline or the stepping-stone to a career defined by the structures and customs of higher education. It was a personal commitment, a way of life, inspired by a sense of wonder, much like a religion though without the dogma. Philosophers were devoted to wisdom but didn’t propound doctrines or claim to have discovered the Truth. Their wisdom, like that of the prototype Socrates, consisted of an awareness that they knew nothing. Insofar as they could be said to possess knowledge, it was of the questions, not the answers, and philosophers ceased to be philosophers, Strauss said, when certainty replaced Socratic doubt. Monk-like, they pursued a contemplative life of reasoned discussion and disputation about that which they did not know, far from the meaningless bustle of the everyday world. Their advantage over the ignorant masses was their intellectual humility. All
Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
In his movie The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke depicts a normal middle-class family who, for no apparent reason, one day quit their jobs, destroy everything in their apartment, including all the cash they have just withdrawn from the bank, and commit suicide. The story, according to Haneke, was inspired by a true story of an Austrian middle-class family who committed collective suicide. As Haneke points out in a subsequent interview, the cliché questions that people are tempted to ask when confronted with such a situation are: “did they have some trouble in their marriage?”, or “were they dissatisfied with their jobs?”. Haneke’s point, however, is to discredit such questions; if he wanted to create a Hollywood-style drama, he would have offered clues indicating some such problems that we superficially seek when trying to explain people’s choices. But his point was precisely that the most profound thoughts about whether life is meaningful occur once we have swept aside all the clichés about the pleasure or lack thereof of “love, work, and play” (Thagard), or of “being whooshed up in sports events and being absorbed in the coffee-making craft” (Dreyfus and Kelly). Psychologically, or psychotherapeutically, these are very useful ways of “finding meaning in one’s life”, but philosophically, they are rather ways of how to avoid raising the question, how to insulate oneself from the likelihood that the question of meaning will be raised to oneself. In my view, then, the particular answer to the second question (what is the meaning of life?) is not that important, because whatever answer one offers, even the nihilist or absurdist answer, is many times good enough if the purpose is to get rid of the state of puzzlement. More importantly, however, what matters is that the question itself was raised, and the question is posterior to the more fundamental one of whether there is any meaning at all in life. It is also intuitive that we could judge someone’s life as meaningless if that person has never wondered whether her life, and life in general, is meaningful or not. At the same time, our proposal is, in my opinion, neither elitist, nor parochial in any way; I find it empirically quite plausible that the vast majority of people have actually asked this question or some version of it at least once during their lives, regardless of their social class, wealth, religion, ethnicity, gender, cultural background, or historical period.
István Aranyosi (God, Mind and Logical Space: A Revisionary Approach to Divinity (Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion))
With God nothing is ever lost, so every experience, even the most painful ones, can mold our souls for eternity. People who do not understand this get lost in their suffering because they see it as meaningless. -- page 41
Evan Howard (The Galilean Secret: A Novel)
If I can change the world at least 1% to peace, truth and altruistic lovingkindness through my writing, my life will not have been meaningless and lost to the nothingness of time.
Mark F. Kalita (My Future Mother)
Some people spend their entire lives doing meaningless things. They do not think twice before wasting away an entire day, or a week, or a month or even a year! They have no sense of purpose or aim in life. They feel great when other people praise them in meaningless ways. Maybe one day they will realize the meaninglessness of their existence and then perhaps they may strive to achieve something of value in their lives!
Avijeet Das
The Mind can think only one thought at a time. If your mind is occupied by a meaningless thought, you block a meaningful thought from entering it.
R.V.M.
Wonderful You Love you for being so meaningful, i my meaningless life, Love you for being so true, even when my life was a complete lie, Love you for being so strong, when i was weak within, Love you for being so natural, when i was being artificial, Love you for being an end to my pain , Love you for being the strength that i regain, Love you for all the colors in life, Love you for all that matters in my life, Love you for being my power, Love you for being my saver,
Ratish Edwards
People who are hypocritical pretenders traitors, liars and fakers Will cause meaningful relationships to become meaningless
Maisie A. Smikle
We followed him to a covered veranda. In America, we would call that a lemonade porch, however, in South Africa, they call it a stoep. A meeting place located outside the front of the home where friends and family can gather, and one can watch the rising or the setting of the sun in the cozy spot simply called a stoep. The stoep projected a natural ambience of peace and harmony, as a light breeze filled the space with its woodsy fragrance of pine and other natural fragrances inspired by the area’s shrubbery. It almost felt like it was hypnotizing one into a deeper state of tranquility, a state of existence that celebrated the quiet pockets of solitude where a richer from of living is housed. It made one slouch a little more meaningfully and relax the muscles of your body a little more conscientiously, as you let go of one’s innate need to think – to think to the point of hyper focusing on the meaningless details of life, for example, the incessant need to make every moment in life count… Yet, the stoep’s lesson of deeper living is simply the gift of becoming reacquainted with the joy of just being – open yet connected to now, without a higher purpose beyond that. Sometimes, the greatest gift that we can give ourselves is just to sit in the rawness of the moment without any outcome or intention in mind – except, to breathe in the life of the area around us. That is where my afternoon’s lesson ended, knowing that a stoep is a space where quality of human connection is made with or without the presence of any audience because it’s that space that celebrates the stillness of nothing and yet everything simultaneously, or in the words of Rumi: “In order to understand the dance, one must be still. And in order to truly understand the stillness, one must dance.” In South Africa that concept is lovingly called…Die Stoep, a space of possibility.
hlbalcomb
[My father] would tell me not to listen to too many words. "The strength of words lies in implementation, otherwise they are meaningless." He himself was a man of very few words, but whatever he said was enough to make an impact on me. He explained why, "Too many dialogues scatter and waste, say a little so that your words are remembered.
Tehmina Durrani (Edhi: A Mirror To The Blind)
Pierre wakes up for good. As he's lying there yawning, he vaguely remembers a couple of false starts inspired by a ringing phone. He looks to his left. It's eleven. Next thing, he's stumbling down the hall toward his phone machine. 'Wait. Coffee,' he whispers in a shredded voice, veering back into the kitchen. He does what he has to, then plays back the messages, sips. Beep. 'It's Paul at Man Age. Appointment, twelve-thirty P.M., hour, Gramercy Park Hotel, room three-forty-four, name Terrence. Later.' Beep. 'Paul again. Appointment, two P.M., Washington Annex Hotel, room six-twenty, a play-it-by-ear, name Dennis, I think the same Dennis from last night. Check with us mid-afternoon. You're a popular dude. Later.' Beep. 'P., it's Marv, you there? . . . No? . . . Call me at work. Love ya.' On his way to the shower Pierre makes a stop at the stereo, plays side one of Here Comes the Warm Jets, an old Eno album. It's still on his turntable. It has this cool, deconstructive, self-conscious pop sound typical of the '70s Art Rock Pierre loves. He doesn't know why it's fantastic exactly. If he were articulate, and not just nosy, he'd write an essay about it. Instead he stomps around in the shower yelling the twisted lyrics. ' "By this time / I'd got to looking for a kind of / substitute . . ." ' It's weird to get lost in something so calculatedly chaotic. It's retro, pre-punk, bourgeois, meaningless, etc. ' ". . . I can't tell you quite how / except that it rhymes with / dissolute." ' Pierre covers his ears, beams, snorts wildly. Tying his sneakers, he flips the scuffed-up LP, plays his two favorite songs on the second side, which happen to sit third and fourth, and are aurally welded together by some distorted synthesizer-esque percussion, maybe ten, fifteen seconds in length. Pierre flops back in his chair, soaks the interlude up. It screeches, whines, bleeps like an orgasming robot.
Dennis Cooper (By Dennis Cooper Frisk (First Edition, First Printing) [Paperback])
Money, or wealth in general, is meaningless to a poor mindset.
Mwanandeke Kindembo