Quotes About Meaning

The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love?

You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective. Something like that.

Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real.

what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down?

It's a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails.

The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him.

Ce-a cautat la mine?Nu atat dragoste, cat satisfactia vanitatii lui.

Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!...

why am i dying to live, if im just living to die?

The more deeply language is probed, the more traces it reveals of the beings that produce it.

Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy. Indeed, as the Four Wise Ones once said, it may be all you need.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

If you find that the reader of popular romances--however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

Why it's simply impassible! Alice: Why, don't you mean impossible? Door: No, I do mean impassible. (chuckles) Nothing's impossible!

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?"So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,"They are merely conventional signs!"

"Tut, tut, child," said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on."I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least—at least I mean what I say—that's the same thing, you know.""Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"

Everything has got a moral if you can only find it.

Why it's simply impassible! Alice: Why, don't you mean impossible? Door: No, I do mean impassible. (chuckles) Nothing's impossible!

Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with "no way" trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.

Not how long you live, but how much you have lived, how much meaning your life has absorbed and passed on, is what matters.

Destroy the undefinable subjective component, and the whole cosmic process, like the process of time-keeping, becomes meaningless-indeed unimaginable.