Quotes About Meaning

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence.

When asked, 'What did you want to say in this work?' he would answer, 'I've said what I've said.' This made sense in where everyone assumed music had a meaning - but where saying the wrong thing could get a person killed. -Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

But the bridge that crosses the great gulf runs from God to us, never from us to God. We do not travel through the cross to find God; instead, God has traveled through the cross to find us. The significance of this distinction is great.

God presents His works embellished with color, meaning, and content in order to make Himself known and loved to those seeking Him. We are sent to this world with the responsibility, then, to affect and reshape things with His permission, to reflect our understanding, but also to be attentive to the true purpose and meaning of the creation of things.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

Just because the solutions of problems are not visible at any particular time does not mean that those problems will never be alleviated -- or confined to tolerable dimensions. History has a way of changing the very terms in which problems operate and of leaving them, in the end, unsolved, to be sure, yet strangely deflated of their original meaning and importance.

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don't know. Likewise, I don't know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I'm reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.

It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

Theology must learn to see in the dark. Theology emerges from God's gracious act of mercy at our wrestling for meaning in our human condition.

Driving home from work every day is a metaphor

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little. You've done well, and honorably.

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little. You've done well, and honourably.

All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.

If the words have no heart, there is no heart.

He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.

because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

So what were people getting so excited about? What was this symphony saying to them? We are still arguing about that a whole human lifetime later. Audiences are still trying to decipher the codes in Shostakovich's symphonies, trying to see under the masks he wore to the true face we expect to find beneath. "It's very difficult to speak through a mask," as the writer Viktor Shklovsky said, but "only a few can play themselves without it.

It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.

Yes. Just think: the literal meaning of the Chinese characters for "revolution" is "elimination of life".

You became a memory everyone could share / and my work in this life is to chisel at memory.

Ninguna palabra está completa / ni siquiera en alemán que las tiene tan grandes.