Quotes About Meaning

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.

I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.

Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It's in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means 'the long suffering one'.

Witchery popery popery witchery – all the same thing.

A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.

Por qué lo menos original que podemos decirnos uno a otro sigue siendo lo que más anhelamos oír?

I know how it is. Saying too much. Saying too little. Who says enough? Just enough? My closest conversations are bad translations. That's not what I meant--not what I meant at all.

I saw a lot of working class men and women - myself included - living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning.

Las palabras son la parte del silencio que puede ser hablada

What you are pursuing is meaning -- a meaningful life. There's the hap -- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whichever metaphor you want to use -- that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

There's a lot of talk about freedom. It's like the Holy Grail, we grow up hearing about it, it exists, we're sure of that, and every person has his own idea of where.

gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

I say I'm in love with her, what does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly she explains me to myself; like genius she is ignorant of what she does.

The wind blew and it didn't seem important, but tomorrow when the wind blew, it would be important. All the familiar things were getting different meanings.

got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

But happiness is not a potato.

I've thought of killing myself so many times. I don't do it, not because I am a coward, but because it would be easier for me to be dead. What's my life? I make money and I make memories. That's not a life. I don't kill myself because living is my own life sentence.

That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

J'étais fait pour vivre, et je meurs sans avoir vécu.

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour, she'd ask us, when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?

Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.

I'd rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than with trashy lawn ornaments.

Everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.