Quotes About Meaning

We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

La question à l'échelle du macrocosme comme du microcosme, y a-t-il une intention ou bien seulement nécessité et hasard ? (p.203)

It is not how long one lives, but how well one lives that is important.

The Teachers, even of Christianity, are in general, the most ignorant of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as incomprehensible as the Sohar. p. 105

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

for the unexamined life is not worth living.

the most important thing is not life, but the good life.

I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.

But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

The word friend is common, the fact is rare.

We are completely perplexed, then, and you must clear up the question for us, of what you intend to signify when you use the word being. Obviously you must be quite familiar with what you mean, whereas we, who formerly imagined we knew, are now at a loss.

The greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.; Cratyl), although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own writings (e.g. Rep.).

If a person does not attend to the meaning of terms as they are commonly used in argument, he may be involved even in greater paradoxes

I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.

Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.

To refer a subject to a negative class is unmeaning, unless the 'not' is a mere modification of the positive, as in the example of 'not honourable' and 'dishonourable'; or unless the class is characterized by the absence rather than the presence of a particular quality.

The life which is not examined is not worth living.

repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.

if one of us, or someone else, merely {12} says that something is so, do we accept that it is so? Or should we examine what the speaker means?

It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue.

It is not Love absolutely that is good or praiseworthy, but only that Love which impels meant to love aright.