Significance Quotes

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. (Aristotle)
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk? View quote
Laurence J. Peter
Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. View quote
Václav Havel
Almost the only persons who may be said to comprehend even approximately the significance, principles, and purposes of Socialism are the chief leaders of the extreme wings of the Socialistic forces, and perhaps a few of the money kings themselves. View quote
Benjamin Tucker
In all matters but particularly in architecture ...that which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking and that which gives significance is a demonstration on scientific principles. ...One who professes himself an architect should be well versed in both directions. View quote
Vitruvius
The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function. View quote
Jonathan Ive
I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars. View quote
Peter Atkins
As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence. View quote
Herbert Read
Americans need to understand the significance of having their civil liberties dismantled. It doesn't just affect terrorists and foreigners, it affects us all. View quote
Bianca Jagger
Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records! (Evan Parker)
The wealth of south Florida, but even more important, the meaning and significance of south Florida lies in the black muck of the Everglades and the inevitable development of this country to be the great tropic agricultural center of the world. View quote
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. View quote
William Lane Craig
Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether? View quote
William James
In a political context of the utmost significance, ["freedom from fear"] recognizes a human right which, in a broad sense, may be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights. View quote
Dag Hammarskjöld
I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory - Wait God's will. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. View quote
James Salter
In naturalism, man is actually very insignificant, but arrogates to himself stupendous power. In Christianity, man is actually the apex of created significance, but is called to see it in abject humility. View quote
Ravi Zacharias
Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. View quote
J. G. Ballard
The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power. View quote
Alfred Adler
Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord, they were born on the canvas; that is why it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them. (Georges Braque)
Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid. View quote
Lucian Freud
As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance. View quote
Henry Miller
The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance - crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry. View quote
E. O. Wilson