Quotes About Meaning

Non-narrative action: Does not depend on a narrative for the action to be right—the narrative is just there to motivate, entertain, or prompt action. See flâneur.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.

The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).

you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant

Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise.

What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can't capture.

while the statements are dressed up to look as if they were made for the benefit of the collective.

is neither meaningful nor relevant.

it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby.

but that is not where the significance of the story lies.

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise. The modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy wrote a piece in 1915 after Philostratus' adage "For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen.

Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio: only when the words outperform silence

That second is not in itself significant enough for someone to draw conclusions.

we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living

to figure out why ethics, moral obligations, and skills cannot be easily separable in real life, consider the following when you tell someone in a position of responsibility, say your bookkeeper, I trust you. Do you mean that one you trust his ethics?

the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

his conversation becomes mere chitchat around the point, never getting to the central idea.

their role being confined to analysis, not decision making.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, a simple point that has the following implications: for the antifragile, good news tends to be absent from past data, and for

the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you've reread him)

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.