Quotes About Meaning

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself, to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask, including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

I'm tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?

Personally, I think any more than two or three kids is not a family, it's a litter.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

A dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

I mean by this Sacrament an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

Blue is true, Yellow's jealous, Green's forsaken, Red's brazen, White is love, And black is death.

The dedicated life is the life worth living.

[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives . . . most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity . . . when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, tho' the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.

Think that day lost whose (low) descending sun Views from thy hand no noble action done.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.

What men value in the world is not rights, but privileges.

Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

No emotional crisis is wholly the product of outward circumstances. These may precipitate it. But what turns an objective situation into a subjectively critical one is the interpretation the individual puts upon it - the meaning it has in his emotional economy; the way it affects his self-image.