#meaning

Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#death #life #meaning #death

The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #death #despair #eternal-life #heaven

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. ↗

— Huey Newton

#fear #itself #meaning #without

She made the decision that her existence had lost its meaning. And you cannot judge that. ↗

— Jack Kevorkian

#decision #existence #had #her #judge

I think it is the duty of all human beings, as intelligent and communicative beings, to learn all the ideas thought up before ours and use them as a means to think up new ones. ↗

— Jonathan Culver

#human-beings #humans #ideas #intelligence #learning

I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now. That that’s how we find our way toward meaning. Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots. ↗

— Franny Billingsley

#history #inevitabilities #inspiration #meaning #death

Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder? ↗

— Alain de Botton

#business #death #marketing #meaning #products

It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years’ time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal. ↗

— Neel Burton

#happiness #immortality #meaning #time #death

The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing. ↗

— Ronnie Barker

#double #double meaning #joke #marvelous #marvelous thing

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. ↗

— Iris Murdoch

#meaning #time #death