A Quote by John Dewey
To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions--that is art.
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The only way I can experience my life as meaningless is to work as hard as I possibly can to tell myself it has no meaning. At a deeper level of reality, my life can't help but have meaning, because everything is continually unfolding, and I am connected into that unfolding in ways that I can't even imagine.
To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how
Music, and art for that matter, to me is not about true meaning to anyone else but yourself. If I told you the meaning of it all from my point of view it would erase the intimacy of art. I feel like art is up for interpretation, so if I told you my meaning, how could you truly relate it to anything that “you” personally are going through?? That is the beauty of art and music in particular
Art is freedom. If we don't have that element, we don't feel human anymore. Art is not decoration or a function. Before all that, art is art. This connection to meaning - our inner, intuitive knowledge - is something.
For many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything language-like, can't intelligibly be said to have meaning. An encouraging development in the last couple of decades is a return by philosophers to addressing - as nearly all people do at some time or another - the question of life's meaning.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made . Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.
It turns out, in fact, that 'theories of meaning' are typically not about meaning in an everyday or 'folk' sense at all. They are theories designed to compute the truth or assertibility conditions of sentences from their components.
A fact was the hard outer cover of meaning, and meaning was the soft living stuff inside a fact. Fact and meaning were the driving cogs of living. If the gear of fact drove the gear of meaning, then they revolved in opposite directions, but put the gear of fantasy between the two and they both revolved in the same direction. Fantasy was and is important; it leads to heaven knows where, but follow it and see. Sometimes it pays off.
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
There is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning - if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment.
People are not prepared or able to rejoice in suffering unless they experience a massive biblical revolution of how they think and feel about the meaning of life. Human nature and American culture make it impossible to rejoice in suffering. This is a miracle in the human soul wrought by God through His Word.
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
Life has no meaning. It doesn't need a meaning. A meaning is an arbitrary thought formulation that we affix to it because we are in the mood. Life is its own raison d'etre.
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