Quotes About Meaning

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

I beg you, don't use the verb, 'discover', I hate it. What does it mean, that I didn't exist before?

In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than - shall we say? - fifty percent of the total, and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.

Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

I know exactly what my songs are about and I try not to tell people, because a friend of mine really loves 'Stop Your Tears' and I made the mistake of telling her what it's about one day. Now she has to distract herself and look elsewhere when I sing the last verse about being at the river with the baby, because she knows too much.

Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

I have no sense of myself as a sex symbol at all. But the meaning of sex symbol might be a little different in Japan to elsewhere. The Japanese version seems to come with a stronger emphasis on a sort of grownup or mature male charm. And if that's the case, then I guess I'm happy to hear it.

I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film.

I'm named after a horse. My mom's best friend had a horse named Brooke, so my dad suggested 'Brooklyn' as a more formal version, and it just stuck - and now I live in Brooklyn part-time, so go figure.

The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.

For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.

Nasmeh dreves, lovorovega zelenja, to je nekaj pomenilo, to je bila resni?na skrivnost bivanja.

Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

No street corner has any justification over another one. Custom dissolves into nothingness.

But existence is a deflection.

Bugünkü aÅŸamada, mevcut düÅŸünme yöntemlerimizle, bir düÅŸüncenin bir nesne kar??s?ndaki aç?l?m? yaln?zl??? öngörmektedir.