#significance

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

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#fiction #fictional #life #meaning #pattern

My life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. It means nothing. ↗

— David Hewson

#life #meaninglessness #life

Remembering that man is indeed the microcosm, the universe in miniature, the Divine Dance of the future should be able to convey with its slightest gestures some significance of the universe. ↗

— Ruth St. Denis

#convey #dance #divine #future #gestures

This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. ↗

— Henry A. Wallace

#democracy #dullness #failure #general #general welfare

Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. ↗

— Peter Warlock

#date #either #good #modern #music

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

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance. ↗

— Joseph Brodsky

#insignificance #language #lesson #life #most

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

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick. ↗

— Mick Ralphs

#any #churning #find #forty #good