Quotes About Meaning

If we were required to know the position of the fruit dots or the character of the indusiumís, nothing could be easier to ascertain, but if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount to anything, signify anything to you, that they be another sacred scripture and revelation to you, help to redeem your life, this end is not so easily accomplished.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

With all your science - can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

is greater than the means. What is the use of having faith? It is to connect the soul with God. And what is the object of connecting man with God? That he may become like God. But God is Love. Hence Faith, the means, is in order to Love, the end. Love, therefore, obviously is greater than faith. "If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

O Amor é a regra que resume todas as outras regras. O Amor é o mandamento que justifica todos os outros mandamentos.

Aunque hable las lenguas de los hombres y de los ángeles, si no tuviera Amor, sería como el bronce que suena, o como el címbalo que tañe.

Geologists search for the meaning to be read into the piled-up strata of the earth much as a historian might turn the pages of an ancient, damaged manuscript. The astronomer seeks the answer to his questions in the depths of space. Still other men concentrate on the scriptures alone. The wise man searches all these and other sources, knowing that all are communications from the same divine source and certain that, if followed far enough, all will guide him back to the Divine Presence.

By the "Establishment," I do not mean only the centers of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler.

To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive...but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life of its own.

The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

The best example is boondocks. Originally in Tagalog it signified a mountain, but, when poor natives explained that they came from mountainous areas, outsiders imagined the word was a general term for any slummy or primitive place.

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

Johnson the poet recognizes that there are times when a little scientific precision may be sacrificed in the interests of a memorable formula. Thus 'to hiccough' is 'to sob with convulsion of the stomach', while an 'embryo' is 'the offspring yet unfinished in the womb'. 'Thumb' is defined simply as 'the short strong finger answering to the other four'. A 'puppet' is 'a wooden tragedian'.

The well-known kosher has come to mean 'legitimate' or 'good quality', although it of course retains the fastidious sense 'acceptable according to the rules of Jewish dietary law as executed under rabbinical supervision'.26

is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he'd checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn't been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Vereker's secret… the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.