Quotes About Meaning

Yes … but was I happy? Did I sit there and did contentment bathe me in its warm light?

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

The Baron told her that only art meant anything.

I always feel that other people's lives are filled with meaning. You look at them on the street and think how real their lives must be. Of course, you also know that isn't true.

Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger: cool guys, smart, lotta meat between the ears on those fellas, and certainly trying to define who we are in the world or the universe is a noble undertaking. But isn't it somewhat as legitimate to try to define the reason why people do the horrible things they do? It's a fascinating query for me. It's a kick. Hence, my plight. I write horror.

Whoever said life has anything to do with what we want or don't want? Life's a gift, Cassie. Sometimes we have to give something back.

What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.

made him more conscious of how little experience he had of saying what he meant.

So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste.

Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?

He wondered if he could ever make his ego light enough to relax in not having to settle the meaning of things. What would that feel like?

Augustine wrote, "That first way [to truth] is humility; the second way is humility, and the third way is humility."1 If humility does not precede our wisdom and help, our efforts are meaningless. Paul, it seems, would agree. Life in Christ starts with humility.

Whatever our monument might be, we want it to be public, even if the public is one friend.

Sin can certainly be a cause of depression, but you must be careful about connecting the dots between the two. If you are being honest, you will always find sin in your life. Everyone does. That doesn't mean that sin caused your depression.

Que diga amor? Love? Hate? Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird's call, of a child's secret thoughts in her mother's womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman's breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries.

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

Then what do you want with me?'... 'The pursuit of happiness.

Life is great if properly viewed in any aspect; it is mainly great when viewed in connection with the world to come.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.