Quotes About Meaning

You have to feel what's right, and sometimes what's right in art is sad.

The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

Adrian Forty was perhaps the first person to propose that the surprise answer to the missing term in the old equation, architecture = buildings + x, was words. If that's right, as I am increasingly persuaded, it explains why so much talk and writing envelops the practice of design.

A life void-of-purpose is no life at all

There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else's ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered.

And here was the moment. The end of it all, for civilization was merely another name for friendship, and friendship was coming to an end.

Believing, too, that is not enough. You cannot just believe. Your belief must have a purpose.

Boredom sends up a flare: meaning exists here, boredom beckons, but stranded meaning. Meaning that requires rescue.

The record collection or magazine or newspaper might reveal some clue to a social movement or trend or fashion or sensibility which defies their moronic stranglehold on consciousness. A burp of resistance. A clue to a way out. A signal that life doesn't actually depend on high-speed Internet access. And the physicality of the item infers that things meant something once, that everything wasn't always a meaningless, equivocal post on Tumblr.

I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.

She said being inside a language was like being in a person's house - after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.

The moment you fall to your knees in front of a cross, thinking you're praying to some God, you're missing the point. The idea is to look through the symbol to the meaning behind it. Or, as Zen Buddhists put it: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." T

The right question is: where is the meaning in life? Meaning is a man-made concept. It's something we infer from those experiences that are self-evidently good, and stem from a feeling of joy and wonder. Meaning is not something that occurs in the future. It exists in the here and now, within the fact that our lives are finite. F

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.

Imagine going through years of your life with the gut feeling that none of it really matters yet, that it will start at some point in the future, and that the present doesn't really count. Does this feeling seem familiar? Have you ever told yourself that everything will ultimately fall into place once you [fill in the blank]? Who wouldn't wind up numbed to real hope and possibility after exerting so much energy for stuff that really doesn't matter?

My focus is always on the day. What I've done behind me, I try to have respect for it, and keep an eye on it, and make sure it isn't abused, and obviously be thoughtful about it, because it's all real to me. I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all.

Names were the nails of history. Things were, had been, would be because they had names to guide them through time. Without a name he had no time-boundedness. Therefore he must have a name. But everything was already named, and all names were assigned. He would have to steal one.

COLD. "Cold," he said, and understood. Cold was the meaning for his shivering body, the steaming billows of his breath, the trickleways of water down the windows

And the names drew about themselves a nimbus of quality, of good and bad and color and weight and hardness, a state of existence to come, a state of existence that was and a state of existence that had been.

Perhaps not without a future. His future would be a future of questions, of remembering all that he had forgotten. And perhaps that was all the future he needed, the act of asking was an end in itself.

A joyful task,' he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan's greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson.