Quotes About Meaning

If a poet writes in gibberish, his soul yet understands.

Is there such a thing as pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning? Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

A poem compresses much in a tight space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Poetry was music. Poetry was not the thing said, but continual evocation of delicious suggestions of meaning. Poetry was an unconscious crystallization of glittering images upon the bare twig of metre. Poetry, at the nadir of this search for its essence, became the formless babble and vomit of the poet's subconscious mind.

The poem is, then, a little myth of man's capacity for making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

Words are rather the drossy part of poetry; imagination the life of it.

Oaths are the fossils of piety. The geologist recognizes in them the relics of a once active devotion, but they are now only counters and pebbles tossed about in the unconscious play of expression. The lighter and more constant their use, the less their meaning.

Of course, talking only in proverbs would be impossible. Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning.

When you walk in purpose, you collide with destiny.

When he walks he casts a shadow of purpose.

William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them.

Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words, but cannot a few well-spoken words convey as many pictures?

To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler.

You might not be able to answer a question with a question but you can always answer a question with a quote!

What shall I say to you? What can I say Better than silence is?...

The orator... is... most eloquent when most silent.

Silence is also speech.

The goal of life: simple but not empty.

Part of the reason why we feel these transitions so keenly is that we know that our lives matter.