Quotes About Meaning

Please wait,' she said in Spanish, then repeated the words, 'Esperen, por favor,' remembering that the single verb meant both to wait and hope. This extraordinary language, she thought.

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

We need to listen carefully to the wisdom of our symptoms and to try to decode their meaning, because some of us have learned to settle, to fall silent; to deny that unfair circumstances exist or matter, and then to call our compromises "life." But our bodies, our deeper unconscious selves, remain harder to fool.

Let us question these questions. Anger is neither legitimate nor illegitimate, meaningful nor pointless. Anger simply is. To ask, "Is my anger legitimate?" is similar to asking, "Do I have a right to be thirsty? After all, I just had a glass of water fifteen minutes ago. Surely my thirst is not legitimate. And besides, what's the point of getting thirsty when I can't get anything to drink now, anyway?

Constitutional rights do not always have easily ascertainable boundaries, and controversy over the meaning of our Nation's most majestic guarantees frequently has been turbulent. As judges, however, we are sworn to uphold the law even when its content gives rise to bitter dispute.

You want people walking away from the conversation with some kernel of wisdom or some kind of impact.

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.

Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.

Life is like a library owned by the author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.

The Horatian Spanish poet Antonio Machado defined poetry as 'a few true words', a definition that sounds minimal, even despairing, until you reflect on what a few true words can do.

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.

There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive.

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

Die Frage, was nun eigentlich war zwischen ihnen, würden sie später erörtern, wenn all die Tage in ihrer Erinnerung zu einem einzigen, für immer unvergeßlichen Tag zusammengeflossen sein würden. Auch die Griechen, wußte Onno, die die Grundlage für die westliche Kultur gelegt hatten, besaßen kein Wort für "Kultur". Die Wörter entstanden erst, wenn die Sache verschwunden war.

Wie jeder Mensch hat auch ein Buchstabe eine Seele und einen Körper. Seine Seele ist das, was er sagt, und sein Körper ist das, woraus er gemacht ist: aus Tinte oder aus Stein.

De vraag, wat dat was tussen hen, zouden zij pas later bespreken - toen het er niet meer was, toen al die dagen in hun herinnering ineengevloeid waren tot een eeuwig-onvergetelijke dag. Ook de grieken, wist hij, die de grondslag hadden gelegd van de westerse cultuur, bezaten geen woord voor cultuur. De woorden kwamen pas als de zaak was verdwenen.

Boeken die niet gebaseerd zijn op een schema zijn weekdieren.

Ik weet niet hoe de wereld in elkaar zit, Onno, maar misschien is dat mijn kracht. Als je het mij vraagt zit zij helemaal niet in elkaar, net zo min als de inhoud van een vuilnisbak. Volgens mij is de wereld – althans op aarde – één reusachtig, geïmproviseerd rommeltje, dat in onverklaarbare redenen nog steeds min of meer functioneert. De mens hoor eigenlijk helemaal niet thuis in het heelal; maar nu hij er eenmaal is, is in allerlei opzichten alles mogelijk.

Still, national politics meant little to him: about as much as paper airplanes would mean to the survivor of a plane crash.

That question is too good to spoil with an answer.