Quotes About Meaning

One hears all sorts of things. The question is whether they matter.

in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked.

but she knew about angels. St. Augustine had said, "Angel is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is spirit; if you seek the name of their office, it is angel; from what they are, spirit, from what they do, angel.

The meaning of something is its connection to something else

The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing. Can you see the sharpest edge of that knife?

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do.

Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning.

he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about Basel more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.

Ciò che noi sappiamo è che, in un modo non stereotipato, nessuno sa nulla. Non puoi sapere nulla. Le cose che sai... non le sai. Intenzioni? Motivi? Conseguenze? Significati? Tutto ciò che non sappiamo è stupefacente. Ancor più stupefacente è quello che crediamo di sapere.

All this, this luck – what did it mean? Coming so suddenly, and on such a scale, it was as baffling as a misfortune.

I saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is.

Lo malo de la vida es que no sabes realmente si es un proceso descendente, no sabes en absoluto de qué se trata.

Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Llega un momento, como me llegó a mí hace unos meses, en que se halla uno en tal estado de desamparo y confusión, que no logra comprender lo que otrora resultaba obvio: por qué hago lo que hago, por qué vivo donde vivo, por qué comparto mi vida con quien la comparto.

Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

Unlike him, many were able not merely to construct whole conversations that revolved around their grandchildren but to find sufficient grounds for existence in the existence of their grandchildren.

In nome della ragione, si cerca sempre un motivo più elevato, un significato più profondo: allora avevo ancora l'abitudine di sforzarmi di essere ragionevole anche sull'irragionevole e cercare la complessità nelle cose semplici. Esigevo risposte dalla mia intelligenza, quando non erano affatto necessarie. Pensavo: non può essere così meschino e insulso come sembra. Questo non può essere che un decimo della sua storia. Deve avere, dentro, qualcosa di più.

exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English "makes a statement" or "sends a message"—even though these statements/messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you're trying to communicate.

Victor Frankl? Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning?

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.

As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always Sincerity, with a motive.