Quotes About Meaning

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.

But the cause for which we fought was higher; our thought wider... That thought was our power.

The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.

My aim is not to exhibit craft, but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

All that is literature seeks to communicate power

We are not here for the sake of possessions, or of power. Or of happiness, but we are here to transfigure the divine out of human spirit.

Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.

The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

The meaning of life is creative love. Not love as an inner feeling, as a private sentimental emotion, but love as a dynamic power moving out in the world and doing something original.

If I could interview that horse, Walter mused, I'd know the boy a whole lot better.

at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can't end up in the Friday Folder? That the reason they're doing their schoolwork isn't just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read--books about people and things that matter, books about life and death.

As for me, I'm on a search and have been, I now realize, all my life - to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I'm at it.

I read to live. I read for life.

And if the book is too silly, I find that it's often because the writer doesn't really have anything to say - or there are no values. Or because the whole book is just a lead-up to a trick at the end. If you read the end first, you may have much less patience for wasting time with that kind of book. Even a well-written book can be silly and a waste of time.

But it's one thing to feel that a book can speak beyond its particular time and place to something universal, and another to ignore the circumstances and time in or about which it was written.

What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?" It helped you remember that people aren't here for you; everyone is here for one another.

I'm on a search—and have been, I now realize, all my life—to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I'm at it.

I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one. I

I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there—and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I'll keep reading after I do, too, because—well, because I love to read. I also believe that the Holy Grail of books won't be the greatest book ever written—I am certain there isn't such a thing. I think it will simply be a book that speaks perfectly to me at the moment I most need it and continues to speak to me for the rest of my life.

We build an infinite variety of imaginary games. Groups of people gather together, agree what symbols they're going to use to mean "status," then strive to achieve it.

Sometimes I feel as if there's an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I've missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself...life is so strange, so harsh.