Quotes About Meaning

For a word to be a word, it has to refer to something that is not a word.

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

I learned words, I learned words; but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a 'language-game', apparently had its genesis in this incident.

The application of the parable is, I think, that if you do not understand a statement, then to discover that it has no verification is an important piece of information about it and makes you understand it better. That is to say, you understand it better; you do not find out that there

Obsesia premiilor semnific? o frustrare deloc stimulativ?. Crea?ia în art? fiind a solitudinii ?i originalit??ii, nu a onorurilor ?i reclamei...

Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.

If psychoanalysis is right, virtually the totality of what anthropologists call culture consists of sublimations.

And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

The moral of all this is that with Shakespeare the actable and the theatrical are always what comes first.

Remember too that to me the word myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language.

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.

If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.

Whoever sees life other than as a self-destroying illusion is himself still preoccupied with life. Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.