Quotes About Meaning

We are starving for spiritual nourishment. We are starving for a life that is personal, connected, and meaningful. By choice, that is where we will direct our energy. When we do so, community will arise anew because this spiritual nourishment can only come to us as a gift, as part of a web of gifts in which we participate as giver and receiver. Whether or not it rides the vehicle of something bought, it is irreducibly personal and unique.

We cannot expect a miserable, oppressed populace to exercise much care for anything outside its immediate survival and security. While the poor are kept in a state of survival anxiety through sheer deprivation, the rich suffer poverty of another kind: lack of community, connection, meaning, and intimacy, which can cause severe psychological stress even in conditions of material plenty.

Alphabets therefore encourage an atomistic conception of meaning and, by extension, of the universe

The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories.

When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.5 No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite.

Accordingly, to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves. No

The key to this paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your actions, even your personal, secret struggles, has cosmic significance. You will know then, as you know now, that everything you do matters.

aun cuando hagamos silencio, sutilmente estamos diciendo algo.

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, While meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray...

Some translators turn an author's words from gold to stone, others from stone to gold.

Certainly not quite oddly enough, a very great many prophets, cranks, busybodies, snobs, opportunists, simple folks (and other nonartists) do not know that they do not know precisely what the word Apocalypse means. By God, a good dictionary ought to get up on its hind legs and tell them, sometime.

I used to trouble about what life was for — now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Life: It is about the gift not the package it comes in.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it... Being alive is the meaning.

It is while you are patiently toiling at little tasks that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn upon you.

Ah! my dear Count, life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

The sermon is now the true poppy of literature.

The only difference between graffiti and philosophy is the word "[f*@%]."

PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

When you unprose language, does it become poetry?

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.