Quotes About Meaning

It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.

Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.

Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life

Regarding his friend's insight after losing her spouse to cancer: "She told me she had plenty of people to do things with but nobody to do nothing with.

What was it? What could it-- His last thought was surprise.

In all its manifestations, religion constitutes an immense projection of human meanings into the empty vastness of the universe-a projection, to be sure, which comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers.' - p.100, 'The Sacred Canopy

The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts.

The choice to worry about why we are doing something more than how we do something is risky business.

Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.

What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought we incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of us must become.

Acting on what matters means that we will consistently find ourselves feeling like we are living on the margin of our institutions and our culture. This calls for some detachment from the mainstream.

Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say "no." If we cannot say "no" then "yes" has no meaning

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

if you don't desire anything, the world is without appeal, it loses its beauty. You lack for everything, yet nothing now triggers the need to devour, to incorporate, to make the beautiful object one's own. If the self 's relation to the external world no longer is subtended by desire, it loses all meaning. Raphaël's life is a kind of vegetation, a life without movement or meaning.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

you practice elaboration, there's no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.

Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example, the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you.

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us where we are: what I'm good at, what I care about most, and where I'm headed.

I felt this awful obligation to be charming or at least have something to say, and the pressure of having to be charming (or merely verbal) incapacitates me.

One man's nonsense is another man's sense.

C'è un modo corretto di usare le parole e c'è un modo corretto di comportarsi con gli altri. […] le parole sono più facili da controllare rispetto ai comportamenti. […] Credo che sia questo a farmi paura: la casualità di tutto. Persone che per te potrebbero essere importanti, ti passano accanto e se ne vanno. E tu fai altrettanto. Come si fa a saperlo?

She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Thus it has always been: Only in death do worthless people have worth.