#significance

How good is it to remember one's insignificance: that of a man among billions of men, of an animal amid billions of animals; and one's abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in comparison with Sirius and others, and one's life span in comparison with billions on billions of ages. There is only one significance, you are a worker. The assignment is inscribed in your reason and heart and expressed clearly and comprehensibly by the best among the beings similar to you. The reward for doing the assignment is immediately within you. But what the significance of the assignment is or of its completion, that you are not given to know, nor do you need to know it. It is good enough as it is. What else could you desire? ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#god #man #significance #spirituality #universe

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#intelligence #professionalism #significance #vulnerability #intelligence

An organization which claims to be working for the needs of a community - as SNCC does - must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black power beyond the slogan. ↗

— Stokely Carmichael

#black #claims #community #does #heard

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC. ↗

— Andy Grove

#along #came #could #internet #into

If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals. ↗

— Edmund Husserl

#conscious #consciousness #essential #facts #fertile

Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid. ↗

— Lucian Freud

#colours #emotional #full #i #saturated

Sometimes string figures were used to illustrate stories, as in the case of an Eskimo example that depicts a man catching a salmon. Sometimes they had magic or religious significance. ↗

— Louis Leakey

#catching #example #figures #had #illustrate

Words contract a significance which clings to them long after the condition of things to which they owe it has passed away. ↗

— Joseph Barber Lightfoot

#away #clings #condition #contract #long

The establishment of a law, moreover, does not take place when the first thought of it takes form, or even when its significance is recognised, but only when it has been confirmed by the results of the experiment. ↗

— Dmitri Mendeleev

#confirmed #does #establishment #even #experiment

In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself. ↗

— Ron Paul

#clear #everyone #greater #hussein #itself