Quotes About Meaning

Be useful where thou livest.

A verse may find him who a sermon flies.

History is always the interpretation of the present

The shapes of time are the prey we want to capture

Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?

there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system.

Life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money.

A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water -- an inch deep and then the mud.

Philosophy is really homesickness.

Without the story - in which everyone living, unborn, and dead, participates - men are no more than 'bits of paper blown on the cold wind . . .

And if I drink oblivion of a day,So shorten I the stature of my soul.

To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.

PossibleTo useWords provided one treat themAs enemies.

I know that no one would live outThirty years, fifty years if the world were endingWith his life.

A poetry of the meaning of words And a bond with the universe I think there is no light in the world but the world And I think there is light

Poetry must be at least as powerful as music, but I am not sure that it is possible.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Art, in the sense of fine art, often is a kind of religion in our age, because it appears as a means of transcending society at a time when other means of such transcendence are no longer available for many people, particularly the educated.

We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.

Caring has the gift of making the ordinary special.