True significance Quotes

A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.

We run after values that, at death, become zero. At the end of your life, nobody asks you how many degrees you have, or how many mansions you built, or how many Rolls Royces you could afford. That's what dying patients teach you.

I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow — there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance.

As a believer just because you gain more fame or authority doesn't mean anything, this means you have more feet to wash

In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential that we embody. If we do not embody that, life is wasted.

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

Real greatness has nothing to do with a man’s sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.

When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.

The real meaning of the spoken word has to be demonstrated by practical deeds

Much of the beauty of Christmas lies in its challenge to look further, deeper, until we find its secret in the heart of God. But we never find that unless we look beyond the presents under the tree.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

He didn't want the respect of people who weren’t worth wiping his nose on—people who weren't worth the spatout gum attached to the bottom of his worn-out shoes. The only respect he wanted was from himself and the people who really mattered in his life. The people who really loved and cared about him.

Meaning doesn't lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren't love - the money, the car, the house, the prestige - we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing. ("A Return to Love")

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

Seriousness is the refuge of the shallow. There are events and personal experiences that call forth seriousness but they are fewer than most of us think.

The thought of money and fame and all that is nice to have. But it's not what's really important.

If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

The Body thinks it has an agenda that is important. And the Mind imagines that its agenda is vital to your survival. But the older you get the more you realize that it is the Soul's agenda, and only the Soul's agenda, that matters.

The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.