Quotes About Meaning

Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

said that all people believe in a god—whether it's the god of hopelessness or the god of circumstances or the god of ourselves or the god of some other person. It took me a long time to figure out what my god was.

Most of all, he needed a challenge—because that was what gave life meaning.

All those men had died for some senseless reason, died perhaps without ever knowing exactly what they had fought to accomplish.

you can be homeless in your heart, too. You can be empty inside yourself because you have no spiritual center. You can wander through life without any real sense of who you are or where you belong. You can exist without purpose or cause.

Time didn't have meaning for him. Time had come to a standstill, the world stopped where it was, everything as still and immutable as the mountains and the sun in the sky.

I cannot see the future, but I can sense its possibilities. I sense now that what I am telling you is the truth. But truth, like magic, can have different meanings. It is not an absolute. It does not always come about as we think it will.

Don't be so quick to steal away what that sacrifice meant by insisting it was your fault.

always know what that reason is.

Everything happens for a reason, though we might not

If you want to worry about something, I don't think it should be about whether you owe your existence to God or the Word or whoever. I think you should worry about what's expected of you now that you're here and how you're going to keep from being a major disappointment.

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.

It is conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life is part of the meaning of life, rather as not counting how many words I am uttering when I give an after-dinner speech helps me to give an after-dinner speech. Perhaps life is kept going by our ignorance of its fundamental meaning, as capitalism for Karl Marx

To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead.

Alienation, the 'commodification' of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

Poetry is concerned not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning.

meanings are neither randomly bestowed by readers, nor objectively there on the page in the sense that a watermark is.

Ideology is essentially a matter of meaning; but the condition of advanced capitalism, some would suggest, is one of pervasive non-meaning. The sway of utility and technology bleach social life of significance, subordinating use-value to the empty formalism of exchange-value.

The resurrection for Christians is not just a metaphor. It is real enough, but not in the sense that you could have taken a photograph of it had you been lurking around Jesus's tomb armed with a Kodak. Meanings and values are also real, but you cannot photograph them either. They are real in the same sense that a poem is real.

The work of art had nothing as vulgar as a social purpose.

Alienation, the "commodification" of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady haemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition.

What Nietzsche recognises is that you can get rid of God only if you also do away with innate meaning. The Almighty can survive tragedy, but not absurdity.

What Wittgenstein calls a 'grammar' is a set of rules by which we are able to make sense of things; and such grammars are not correlated with reality. It is not as though some of them provide us with a more accurate representation

If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection of our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever.