Quotes About Meaning

Could we just settle down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? What about practicing not jumping and grabbing when we begin to panic? Relaxing with loneliness is a worthy occupation. As the Japanese poet Ryokan says, "If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments but not with comprehension.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

The act of painting is about one heart telling another heart where he found salvation.

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.