Quotes About Meaning

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told That's offensive as though those two words constitute an argument.

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

I began the project of judging Mother Teresa's reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.

What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

How much vanity must be concealed-not too effectively at that- in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

Except that cancer isn't so … considerate.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.

Many people who belong to no church, and who are even hostile to organized faith, profess a belief in God because, in the usual phrase, it gives their life meaning. (This is of course subject to the same grand regress as the creationist argument: just as we have to ask who then created the Creator, so we're bound to ask if God's life has meaning and, if so, from what deity He or She derives it.)

The Bible commands us to love our enemies. I love the Pope very much.

We now know things about our nature that the founders of religion could not even begin to guess at, and that would have stilled their overconfident tongues if they had known of them. Yet again, once one has disposed of superfluous assumptions, speculation about who designed us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that designer.

What is one ever doing anywhere?

I mean, what is this life of ours supposed to be for? Are we to spend it identifying each other with catalogues, like tourists in an art gallery? Or are we to try to exchange some kind of a signal, however garbled, before it's too late?

But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.

Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.

The incentive is to fight anarchy. That's all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns." "Patterns for what?" "For the sake of patterns. To create meaning. What else is there?

That holy shape becomes a devil best.

Oh, I get it, I said. It's a parable. Cute. Let's go eat.

By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.

The value of the work we do is the value we give to it.