Quotes About Meaning

For of what account are Truth and Love when Life itself has ceased to seem desirable?

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him. Now if you apologize, like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it.

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

Nothing happens carelessly. We're not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art

There is only one inborn error: and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy. Arthur Schopenhauer

Socrates, after all, said that the unexamined life was not worth living. He might have added, however, that continual self-examination would leave us no time to live.

Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art.

Obviously, I'm attracted to heavier movies.

Friendship is not necessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

More powerful than drugs, than God or death or fear itself, are stories. With less instinct than any flatworm, we look for them to tell us what to do, how to behave, how we're going to end up. There're plenty of atheists in foxholes, but none without a personal mythology that gives them meaning. When life seems long and meaningless, stories make it short and exciting, make every accident into a test, into enemy action, into a Plot.

A man once asked Rumi, "Why is it you talk so much about silence?" His answer: "The radiant one inside me has never said a word.

Now that it's all over, what did you really do yesterday that's worth mentioning?

The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

The word "pure" has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it – in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

Do you suppose it all means something? That we're being left clues? Perhaps. Then, no offense, but I fear they've badly overestimated us.

summed up so well that it came to far more    Than the

Without injustices, the name of justice would mean what?

The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign. The Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

In metaphor we say what we mean, but we don't mean what we say. In analogy we mean what we say, but we don't know what we mean.