Meaning Making Quotes

The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

Whoever defines the word, defines the world.

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

You want to change your life? Control the only thing you can control: the meaning you give something.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

Recognize that whether you are worthy or not is all a made-up 'story'...Nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it...There's no one who comes around and stamps you 'worthy' or 'unworthy'. You do that. You make it up. You decide it...If you say you're worthy, you are. If you say you're not worthy, you're not. Either way you will live into your story.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. 'Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities,' St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, 'for when I am weak, then I am strong.'

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.

In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.