Quotes About Meaning

It's the role of narrative to... bridge the gap between philosophy as abstract theory, ideas in the ether, and life as lived on the ground.

the Mishnah is a document of imagination and fantasy, describing out of the shards and remnants of reality how things are, meaning how they are supposed to be

The Mishnah is from no one special in utopia, to whom it may concern.

in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning

If you cut people off from what nourishes them spiritually, something in them dies.

And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain' Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said. 'And what's that like?' 'When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.

But we do not know yet who we are fighting and what we are fighting for.

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.

We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean.

Et je comprends soudain que perdre son nom équivaut à perdre son ombre ; se réduire à son nom c'est se réduire à son ombre.

I am rather inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain.

There is nothing outside of the text.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.

how can I say 'I love you', if I know the love is you .. the word 'love' either as a verb or a noun would be destroyed in front of you

I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

Trouver une forme qui exprime le gâchis, telle est maintenant la tâche de l'artiste».

La poésie […] n'existe, ne s'absente, ne surgit, que pour refuser la réponse. Et pour s'approcher de la question[…] elle ne réponde pas aux questions, elles les pose.

I mean that every word ought to carry the meaning that God has given to life (even though it may never refer to God). It ought to carry joy, hope, forgiveness, love, reconciliation, light, and peace in the order of truth. It contributes to the elucidation of the meaning of life.

Faith has to come to birth as a free act, not a forced one. Otherwise it has no meaning.

The two things cannot be separated. Truth must incarnate itself in reality; reality is empty without truth. If truth is the unfolding of meaning, this is the meaning of what we see to be real and not of an illusion or dream or phantom. This is how it is with us.

Propaganda is necessarily false, when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact.

The unconscious is structured like a language.