Quotes About Meanings

T]he world is richer in associations than meanings . . . and it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.

life is not an echo, endlessly returning the past to us so that we might read and reread in its fading variations the meanings we cannot keep ourselves from wanting.

The older names of flowers involved a similar degree of awareness; we might guess at the qualities of plants called hound's piss and goodnight-at-noon, but it took real intimacy to name a flower courtship-and-matrimony: its sweet scent fades after picking.

The Greek word for "rooster" is built from combined parts that mean "getter out of bed".

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

its heart, it is a story about the power of music and its meanings — a story of secret messages and doublespeak, and of how music itself is a code; how music coaxes people to endure unthinkable tragedy; how it allows us to whisper between the prison bars when we cannot speak aloud; how it can still comfort the suffering, saying, "Whatever has befallen you — you are not alone.

When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.

When we ruminate, we become fruitlessly preoccupied with the fact that we are unhappy and with the causes, meanings, and consequences of our unhappiness.

Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible -- painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings.

Dozens. I've been drawing them forever. It was a way to—" I stopped, surprised that I'd almost said the truth about my mother and what these drawings had meant, about the future I'd been promised, my loneliness and need.

Every Valentine's Day, the student council sponsered a holiday fundraiser by selling roses that would be delievered in class. The roses came in four colors:white, yellow, red, pink, and the subtleties of thier meaning were parsed and analyzed by the female population to no end. Mimi had always understood it thus:white for love, yellow for friendship, red for passion, and pink for a secret crush.

Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: "science" deals only with "hard facts," while the "arts" are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (" discovering who you really are" or "going with your heart") are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward "identities.

That now-archaic word "likely," ubiquitous in slave sale advertisements, had a cluster of converging meanings: vigorous, strong, capable, good-looking, attractive, promising—in other words, likely to reproduce

Around has two main meanings. The most common meaning is vaguely moving from one direction to another. What do many people do on holiday? They walk around the town where they are staying. About and round mean the same, and several verbs have all three forms which mean the same.. The second meaning of around and about is approximate. How much is it? About ten euros. It is around ten euros.