Quotes About Meaning

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

I flee from symbols. I think those who don't want to solve problems go to the symbols. I'm looking for content.

At the end of the day, inflation has been below 2% for quite a long time, and to me, symmetry means getting somewhere above 2% inflation at some point in my Fed career.

When you've been raised in care, rap music isn't just about guns and sexism. They're talking about real things you can hang on to, problems of identity that you have sympathy with. It's not just about the music, with rap: when I was in care, it meant a whole lot more than that.

Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.

I consider personally the election of Barack Hussein Obama to have very great symbolic meaning. A Muslim and a Christian name - so in his name there is a synthesis, although people from time to time want to overlook that, and they do it intentionally.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

Being a mom makes me feel whole and like I understand the meaning of life.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

Life is a million different dots making one gigantic picture. And maybe the big picture is nice, maybe it's amazing, but if you're standing with your face pressed up against a bunch of black dots, it's really hard to tell.

It's weird, because I know Mom is right about the big picture. But Dad is right too: Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other. The dots matter.

She means like - we're here to be here. To live. that's why you lived, Bridge. You lived to live. Just like everyone else.

Simmy entertained slippery thoughts about identity and the meaning of any individual's span on earth. When it came right down to it, she supposed that all a person really amounted to was the sum of their memories.

This is a cardinal Ya-Ya rule: you must meet each person's eyes while clinking glasses in a toast. Otherwise, the ritual has no meaning, it's just pure show. And that is something the Ya-Yas are not.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

Here's an alarming fact: of approximately eight hundred thousand words in the English language, we use about eight hundred on a regular basis. Those eight hundred words have fourteen thousand meanings. By division there are about seventeen meanings per word. In other words, we have a one-in-seventeen chance of being understood as we intended. Perhaps you've heard of Chisholm's Third Law—If you explain something so clearly that no one can misunderstand, someone will.

God's children and their happiness are my reasons for being.

This is publishing, Kip! Since when does logic have anything to do with it?

There is always a cause, but not always a because. And even when there is, the dead are beyond its reach or caring.

I don't actually like explaining the meanings of my songs, because I think people can take away more from it if they use their imagination.