Quotes About Meaning

Life doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

As they prepared to mount, Barak's horse, a large, sturdy gray, sighed and threw a reproachful look at Hettar, and the Algar chuckled. 'What's so funny?' Barak demanded suspiciously. 'The horse said something,' Hettar replied. 'Never mind.

If all you're going to do is talk in riddles, why bother with it at all? Why go to all the trouble of saying things that nobody's able to understand?" "Because it's necessary to say it. The word determines the event. The word puts limits on the event and shapes it. Without the word, the event is merely a random happening. That's the whole purpose of what you call prophecy—to separate the significant from the random.

yo también estoy de paso por esta vida, por eso no pierdo mi tiempo entreteniendo con cosas materiales y prefiero vivir humildemente.

El servicio es para lo que venimos a este mundo.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Capital T-truth is about life before death.

It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist.

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.