Quotes About Meaning

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

You know, sex is actually not so original as the way people love or the stories behind each relationship, which is what you remember. Sex is sex in the end.

Aspect or quality of a verb had, I believe, nothing originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects.

But sacrifice does not mean "death" at all.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning "He of the double door," their word thyra being the same as our door.

I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.

You don't need to," he replied. "You're already saved." And he went on to tell me that the original Greek meaning of the word saved meant that a person was whole.

And always I have this feeling--which may not be true at all--that I am being used as a messenger.

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

A skull graces the bulging muscle of one large bicep, a rose with something stuck in it is along another arm, a spider crawls along his back, and other intricately woven lines join them all together. These tattoos mean something.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.

In poetry's words, life calls to life —Jane Hirshfield

Pompei Quante case diventano una Pompei vivente, non spolverate, non sgombre La catastrofe non è soltanto improvvisa I cuori si fermano in tutti i modi non solo uno A volte la chiave di casa va perduta a volte la serratura A volte il significato di una fine sta nel bussare che non è stato fatto p#163

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

The question shouldn't be Am I happy? but rather, Does my life have meaning? And yes, my life has meaning. I've created two children, and loving them, caring for them, and helping prepare them for life gives my life purpose.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

Stillness was most natural. To go on scrabbling and running and grasping after some kind of life was aberration; stillness was lasting.

It's really not a question of how long you have on this earth; it's about what you do with it.

The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination...you can make feast of straw.

I think of the irony that in our language [Nepali] the word for love can also mean deceit.