Quotes About Meaning

C'est très bizarre les noms. Parfois on ne connaît rien d'eux et on les dit sans cesse.

All words are written in the same ink, 'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same, and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood' all over the page, the paper would not be stained now would I bleed.

We are here for a finite amount of time...it's up to each of us to make that time meaningful and special.

Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.

Even the greatest works of art are couched, not in the language of "mankind," but in the language of a specific cultural tradition, and the loss of the tradition is like the loss of the dictionary;

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.

Ai can be translated as meaning "harmony," "unity," or "to join and become one." The concept of harmony in combat is hard for most people to comprehend. We are all used to fighting force with force, to meeting attack with resistance. The idea of meeting an attack with love and harmony appears contradictory and impossible.

Just the way a dream is a message from your unconscious, a myth is a cultural dream. Decipher the symbols and the meaning of a dream and we understand ourselves better. It's the same with a myth—understanding it gives us insight into a deeper level of our humanity that we all share.

Since no one really knows what or who God is, or whether God is at all, why can't God be hope?

Some kinds of literature demand to be treated respectfully. The obligation is on the reader to live up to them and not so much on them to entertain the reader.

These aren't accidents. They are significant choices, like the choice of a totemic animal: something in your spirit aligns with theirs.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart"- Phyllis Theroux

If you don't consider your life a pilgrimage, it gets downgraded to a trip or even an aimless journey. It is we who make that decision.

I now understand why God created shit and pee: to give even the desperate like me the possibility of refuge.

You're not writing a biography?" Mike now asked. "Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don't think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I'm interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.

The symbols mean everything if you accept the feelings that they carry.

Ecco quindi la mia conclusione: la rassegnazione non ha nulla da invidiare all'eroismo.

Qual è la vera vittoria, quella che fa battere le mani o battere i cuori?

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

C'era un futuro per loro? Sarebbe stato capace di difendere questo amore? Non sarebbero morti entrambi? Non era tutto inutile?

The essence of memory is not in the storage of information, but in the emotions we hold, in the meaning we give to our recollections, in relationships that, because we remember them, stay alive. The friends of my childhood, the pain of a goodbye, the meeting with a special person, a wonderful September afternoon, and so forth—all these are not merely items I keep in an archive. They are vital ingredients of my history.

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

It is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning.