Quotes About Meaning

remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away. In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.

Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.

To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task.

I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost.

El silencio no es el entorno natural para las historias -me dijo en una ocasión la señorita Winter-. Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.

Què havia de fer de tota aquella llibertat?

Cuando escribo, incluso ahora mientras estoy escribiendo esta frase, esta palabra, soy consciente de la presencia de un lector fantasma que se inclina sobre mi hombro y contempla mi pluma, que tergiversa mis palabras y distorsiona mi significado, haciéndome sentir incómoda incluso en la intimidad de mis propios pensamientos.

It was laconic, but it was true. As soon as you started to put more words in, you came to unreason.

Spirituality is not just about religion, or church attendance, or fidelity to one or other legal requirement. Spirituality is understood to be an innate wisdom of the human heart that enlivens a zest for life, a search for meaning and purpose, a love for all that is good and beautiful, a passion to create a better world, a sensitivity to the life-energy (God, if you wish) that permeates the entire cosmos.

Eine Beleidigung ist ein Zitat aus der Vergangenheit. Ihre Bedeutung hat sie nur deshalb, weil sie von unzähligen Sprechern wiederholt worden ist.

Jackson read the Indian treaties in much the same way that Democrats and progressives today read the U.S. Constitution. They care little about what it says; they interpret it to mean what they want it to mean. Jackson

the Declaration of Independence does not mean we are equal in endowments, only in rights.

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts. It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

Art could state very little - it's whole business is to evoke responses.

but it is always dreadful when the pictures in front of one's eyes become meaningless and the real word is there instead and seems meaningless, too.

God - it's merely shorthand for where we come from, where we're going and what it's all about

It was a rather dreadful thought but somehow comforting.

I tried to explain: 'Well, once you stop believing in an old gentleman with a beard...It's only the word God, you know – it makes such a conventional noise.' 'It's merely a shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about.

It's only the word God, you know--it makes such a conventional noise. It's only shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about. And do religious people find out what it's all about? Do they really get the answer to the riddle? They just get a whiff of an answer sometimes.

Well, once you stop believing in an old gentleman with a beard . . .It's only the word God, you know — it makes such a conventional noise." "It's merely shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about." "And do religious people find out what it's all about? Do they really get the answer to the riddle?" "They get just a whiff of an answer sometimes.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.