Quotes About Meaning

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

La belleza, según la sentimos, es algo indescriptible; jamás puede decirse lo que es ni lo que significa.

Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.

Sometimes it crosses my mind that the things I write here are nothingother than images that prisoners or sailors tattoo on their skin.

The 5-year-old sees that Paradise correctly, not in technology but in the fairy story, in the great myths that control and guide our lives. And myth is meaning divined rather than defined, implicit rather than explicit.

Only a sense of humor can help each of us face those great unanswerable questions: Why was I born? Why am I here? Why must I die? What must I do to make my life a triumph? —

The truth and treasure of the universe is its own existence, and our quest for that truth and treasure will be eternal, like the universe itself.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

cultural icons stand the test of time because they speak to our deeper convictions and ignite our dreams.

On a deeper level, the sharing of our lives on a daily basis is a statement of our values and of what makes us tick. In so doing, friends who are far away may feel close by, and long lost acquaintances or relationships may resurface, often with alarming results.

The term cartel was virtually unknown to the American language a generation ago. Like most borrowed words, when first taken over it meant different things to different persons. Time was required to crystallize its meaning. In this country it now commonly refers to international marketing arrangements. In a companion study we have defined such a cartel as an arrangement among, or on behalf of, producers engaged in the same line of business designed to limit or eliminate competition among them.

Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean.

In the lexicon of the political class, the word "sacrifice" means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.

I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.

Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

Well, they will keep on saying: 'Why worry?' But what else are we here for, in heaven's name?