Quotes About Meaning

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

The Great Spirit, when He made earth, never intended that it should be made merchandise.

Setiap orang harus mati. Saya akan mati, dan kamu akan mati. Dan yang penting ialah bagaimana untuk hidup sampai mati.

We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.

Even if work were not an economic necessity, it is a spiritual necessity.

Death must exist for life to have meaning.

As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we're all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we've done all our lives pointless.

Your soul doesn't care what you do for a living - and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing.

When a "founding father's" remarks about "liberty" don't seem to make sense, substitute the word "property" and they do.

I am," I said To no one there An no one heard at all Not even the chair "I am," I cried "I am," said I And I am lost, and I can't even say why Leavin' me lonely still

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.

I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

The keystone of any artistic construction is contained in that simple question, what is the intention?

enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

It is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know the questions that produced them. Indeed, one must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences that look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and, as Francis Bacon said, if they linger in our minds, they become obstructions to clear thinking.

schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.

Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an große Erzählungen – Erzählungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklärungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukunft eines Volkes zu bieten; Erzählungen, die Ideale aufstellen, Verhaltungsregeln vorgeben, die Quellen von Autorität benennen und durch all dies eine Dimension von Kontinuität und Sinnhaftigkeit erzeugen.

What this means is that at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.