Quotes & Sayings About Significant Moments

You know we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they're happening. Back then I thought, well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize that that was the only day. — Moonlight Graham

Since I spent much of my childhood being left behind and ignored, one might think that, as an adult, moments of perceived abandonment would feel old hat. The truth is, as an adult, I am always waiting to be left behind. I'm always ready to be discarded and, therefore, I spend a significant amount of time preparing for this eventuality.
I lower my expectations, I don't seek out meaningful relationships, and I don't engage in any sort of real intimacy, physical or otherwise.
Engage is the key word here. Except, when I engage, when it happens, when I'm left behind it doesn't feel old hat. It feels like it did the first time and it takes me by surprise. So, I don't let it happen. — Penny Reid

Unfortunately, the most significant moments of our lives are often unpleasant. — Andrea Cremer

What I had said in the morning was that this is what we know has happened, but there has been no significant off-site release. Only to find out moments later that, in fact, there had been an off-site release. I still haven't gotten over that. — William Scranton

So it was like that now, catastrophe inevitable at the most empty moments. Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret, guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud. — Maggie Helwig

It was often in small moments that significant things were revealed. — Lisa Kleypas

He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant. Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn't so bad after all, and felt better. — Hanya Yanagihara

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone. — Anthony Storr

There is too great a tendency (perhaps encouraged by popular journalism) to deal with the dramatic moments, forgetting that these are not always the most significant moments ... To find the significant rather than the dramatic features of industrial controversy, of a disagreement in regard to policy on board of directors or between managers, is essential to integrative business policies. — Mary Parker Follett

Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart — Rob Bell

Every significant human project gets perverted for the
advancement of some individual or group. It seems impossible to get rational
direction for more than a few moments, and then that direction is lost. And yet, here
you are. What we did not understand is that humans have an uncanny gift for
invention, imagination, and cleverness. No other sentients are quite so gifted. You
also show altruistic charity in times of crisis. — Kenn Brody

When you wake up from a dream you have only a few precious moments before the details of the dream begin to dissipate and the memory fades.
Not all dreams are significant or worth remembering.
But the ones that are ... happen again.
So, wait for the dream to return. And never be afraid. Instead, consider it an opportunity to learn something profound and possibly wondrous about yourself. — Vera Nazarian

I've always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments. — John Barrowman

In life's most significant moments we are always alone. — Paulo Coelho

In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I firmly believe that life is made up of moments. Some are significant, and some are disposable. Some sit at the edge of your awareness and taunt you when you're trying to sleep, and others fade into the background noise of life. But every moment, no matter how small, has the potential to create or destroy you. — Cecily White

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about. — Raymond Carver

And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford. — Penelope Lively

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It's almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments. — Alain De Botton

I'd learned some hard lessons in my life, but perhaps the most important one was that you have to cherish the insignificant moments you have with your most significant people. To hold onto the times when you're happy. To smile often, and laugh loudly. To enjoy the ones you love, and hold them close to your heart while you still have them. — Julie Johnson

Much of life appears mundane at the time. Yet in God's providence every moment includes significant details arranged by His divine hand. — Dillon Burroughs

All of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It's like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack. — Caprice Crane

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are. — Susan Sontag

For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute — Atul Gawande

I think the most significant moment at a wedding is when you say "I do" and when you do the first dance. — Tyrese Gibson

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

I had killed people before, in war and as a member of the New Orleans police department, and I know what it does to you. Like the hunter, you feel an adrenaline surge of pleasure at having usurped the province of God. The person who says otherwise is lying. But the emotional attitude you form later varies greatly among individuals. Some will keep their remorse alive and feed it as they would a living gargoyle, to assure themselves of their own humanity; others will justify it in the name of a hundred causes, and they'll reach back in moments of their own inadequacy and failure and touch again those flaming shapes that somehow made their impoverished lives historically significant. — James Lee Burke

Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen. — W.P. Kinsella

When I finish a book, I find I cannot start another one immediately. Each book needs time to settle in my mind, to be digested like a meal of many courses. It seems disrespectful to the characters to move on too quickly - after all, I have spent hours in their company, learnt their histories, looked on at significant moments of their lives. — Anna Lyndsey

I guess that's what life is, though, isn't it? A whole bunch of little moments that don't seem significant or life-altering at the time, but when you look back . . .' She shook her head. 'I don't know. They become the most profoundly beautiful things. — Katie Ganshert

You may think that being chic has nothing to do with the most insignificant and mundane moments of the day. Moments like preparing your meals, emptying the dishwasher, and paying bills. But the secret is: those moments aren't insignificant. Au contraire. They are very significant. That's right - if you can change your attitude about making the pasta sauce, choosing your clothes for the day, folding the laundry, setting the table, or dealing with the incoming mail, you can completely change your life. — Jennifer L. Scott

So much of life is in the smallness of moments ... but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant — Ally Condie

Precisely in an age when the inviolable rights of the person are solemnly proclaimed and the value of life is publicly affirmed, the very right to life is being denied or trampled upon, especially at the more significant moments of existence: the moment of birth and the moment of death. — Pope John Paul II

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments - which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. — Atul Gawande

What I'm feeling, I think, is joy. And it's been some time since I've felt that blinkered rush of happiness, This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that'll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It's like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavor of grace. — Craig Silvey

If you think about people's lives, you think about what's significant. And the things I find significant in my life are not the moments when people are yelling at each other. They're the moments when someone says something that is very poignant, but oftentimes not loud. — Patrick Wang

The best players in any high-stakes field - business, entertainment, law, surgery, as well as sport - recognize that pressure occurs at the moments when meaningful accomplishment is possible. In fact, that is the reason why performers perform: for the opportunity to tackle challenges head on, to do something significant, to demonstrate what their hard work and talent can produce. — John Eliot

Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool. — Henry Kissinger

There are moments that change the course of one's lifetime, and often we don't realize how significant those initial may be until years pass. — Robin Hobb

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity-a unity of purpose and endeavour-the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant order-sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought-have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. — Alfred Noyes