Quotes About Meaning

True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.

El desencanto es un oxímoron, una contradicción que el intelecto no puede resolver y que sólo la poesía puede expresar y custodiar

so it was hard to believe that establishing once and for all that there was no God could ever be done definitively. But if it were possible…would Leonard even mind at this point? Would he truly care if he and Pearl—if Man—meant nothing in the scheme of the universe?

This is why I belong, and why I believe. I commend to all this same search for happiness and for the truth.

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.

And for her, now, replaced by the plain language of the dogs, who in a few syllables have everything to say.

Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name.

Where's the beef?

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

A human being is an animal suspended in webs of significance which he himself has spun.

But such an affection for what doesn't fit and won't comport, reality out of place...

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.

Beyond a certain point we reach repetition and discover we are on the way back. Thus, life has no purpose beyond what it is at this moment.

Still getting nowhere but it's the journey that matters not the hole at the end of the road.

There is no such thing as fate. We are born, we live, we die. We invent meaning to make life tolerable.

It's the small things that matter, the daily routines. We struggle and dream, strive for meaning, for purpose, but a pint with a mate in the pub or ten minutes in a café having coffee with your lover. These are the things that make us human, the things we remember.

99 cents is not the value of anything. It is the worth that makes the value of anything.

The physical worth of anything is dependent on the value that you put into it.

Lighting a candle has a purpose. Know your purpose.

The purpose of living is not to live in misery or hatred. Solitude cannot fill anybody's emptiness if the object of living is not known.

There is no prestige in writing if the purpose of writing is not for the weal of the people.