Quotes About Meaning

But this metaphysics, like this science, has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue of symbols, forgetting something that, while science needs symbols for its analytical development, the main object of metaphysics is to do away with symbols.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of the mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.

Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

It is to be noted that a deserted street at four o'clock in the afternoon has as strong a significance as the swarming of a square at market or meeting times.

La lucha contra el aburrimiento ha comenzado. No sabemos si el enemigo público será derrotado. Y sin embargo de esta lucha, de este desafío, depende, hasta cierto punto, el destino y sentido de la modernidad.

not until he has recognized and organized his own energies as social energies (and we shall presently see the exact meaning of these terms), i.e., when the political form and power (the state) no longer exist outside him, above him—not until then is human (as distinguished from political) emancipation achieved. The road leading to freedom is full of obstacles and accidents, especially the political emancipations that are mistaken for true liberations.

C'est tellement triste quand le bonheur s'arrête que je suis pas sûr qu'il vaille le coup.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

I have found it very important in my own life to try to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me. (Finding My Way Home)

Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means....[A] machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

What is the "it" in "write it down"? When you don't have an answer to that question, when you don't know what your goals are, you can use your writing to point you in the right direction. If you don't know what you want, start writing. Writing makes its own meaning

The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom—they are the pillars of society.

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

He made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of talk--why had she said this? what had she meant by that? why had she done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation, and with a young man of Ogden's temperament speculation was but the first step on the way to love.

Para formular una «respuesta a Job» el individuo debe enfrentarse cara a cara consigo mismo. Esta respuesta será la obra de toda su vida, puesto que, retomando el título de un libro reciente, traerá el mensaje de su «primera y última libertad».

It is up to each individual consciousness to develop its own symbol or symbols, its own symbolic universe.

How should the first two chapters of the book of Genesis be understood in their internal, that is, spiritual, sense? It must be done by applying what the Christian world has so utterly forgotten: that everything in the Word, to the smallest detail, envelops and signifies spiritual and celestial things.