Quotes About Meaning

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.

Writer and researcher of group dynamics Christina Baldwin once said, "Words are how we think, story is how we link.

When we really understand it, we will always find grace offensive. And that's exactly the way it should be. If we start to feel comfortable with grace, then we've lost what it really means.

Man was created as a being whose very existence is derived from and dependent upon a Creator whom he must acknowledge as such and from whom he must obtain wisdom and knowledge through revelation. The purpose and meaning of his life, as well as his very existence, is derived and dependent. He can find none of this in himself. Man is not autonomous.

Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly." "By badly you mean unhappily, right?" "As far as I'm concerned, the two are synonymous.

it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning...

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

Are the mass media on the side of the power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?

All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.

To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.

Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.

In the beginning was the word. It was only afterwards that the Silence came. The end itself has disappeared...

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.

The idea that an idea can be stolen from you is meaningless. If it can be stolen from you that is because it is unimportant. If it can be stolen from you, the fact is that it is not yours.

nós somos apenas episodicamente condutores de sentido, no essencial e em profundidade nós nos comportamos como massa, vivendo a maior parte do tempo num modo pânico ou aleatório, aquém ou além do sentido.

meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs

It is thus always by virtue of a declination of meaning, or of non-meaning, that existence takes on form - by virtue, that is, of the deflection of something else. We have no will of our own, and the other is never what we would, of our own volition, choose to confront. Rather, the other is an invasion by something from elsewhere, priority given to what comes from elsewhere, seduction by foreignness and the transmission of foreignness.