Quotes About Meaning

One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.

Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.

I am genuinely slightly vague and chaotic in my habits. For good or ill, you know.

Pain can be vitalising; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

The sexiest people are thinkers. Nobody's interested in somebody who's just vain with a hole in their head, talking about the latest thing - there is no latest thing. It's all rubbish.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

I don't believe things happen in vain. I believe they happen for a reason.

I don't find these technical things like flowers and chocolates romantic at all. I think Valentine's Day makes no sense.

When I was young, we didn't celebrate February 14. For us, Valentine's Day meant Saraswati Puja. And just a single day in a year can't be Valentine's Day.

'Frankenstein' is a work rich in possible meanings, so the horror-show interpretation is as valid as any.

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

In my own experience with films, books, plays, TV, I don't want somebody telling me what it means, because I think I know, and I want my interpretation to be valid, because it is valid.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

I love my work, but I do not think that I am saving the world... I am a Valley Girl.

Nicknames are the most essential in life, more valuable than names.

Without wisdom, the future has no meaning, no valuable purpose.

A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.

To me this movie is about what is valuable. To one person it might be a stone; to someone else, a story in a magazine; to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.

What my work is about is, 'Can something that is not an inanimate object be considered valuable?'

Belief is so valuable and living that it infuses with life everything it enters! It transforms the fleeting glimmer of transitory life into eternal life, dispelling the transience in it.

I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.

If I didn't find art valuable, I would stop doing my work and only work for justice.