Quotes About Meaning

There is a Talmudic legend about three men who go in search of God. One became insane, the other died, and the third met himself.

There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.

Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliations, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one? This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.

La amistad no es menos misteriosa que el amor o que cualquiera de las otras faces de esta confusión que es la vida. He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola.

Lo sucesivo del lenguaje indebidamente exagera los hechos que indicamos, ya que cada palabra abarca un lugar en la página y un instante en la mente del lector...

Ogni linguaggio è un alfabeto di simboli il cui uso presuppone un passato che gli interlocutori condividono; come trasmettere agli altri l'infinito Aleph, che la mia timorosa memoria a stento abbraccia?

Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Czym sÄ… w koÅ"cu sÅ'owa? SÅ'owa to symbole naszych wspólnych wspomnieÅ". Kiedy u?ywam danego sÅ'owa, spodziewam siÄ™, ?e czytelnicy posiadajÄ… pewne doÅ›wiadczenia, zwiÄ…zane z jego znaczeniem.

And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.

The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force. All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Aquí nos encontramos al fin y lo que antes ocurrió no tiene sentido.

Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos. (A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)

Cada lenguaje es una tradición, cada palabra, un símbolo; es baladí lo que un innovador es capaz de alterar...

And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien--poetry is, as we will see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.

Y el azar, salvo que no hay azar, salvo que lo que llamamos azar es nuestra ignorancia de la compleja maquinaria de la causalidad, el azar me hizo encontrar tres pequeños volúmenes. Yo he debido traer uno como talismán ahora. Tres pequeños en la librería Mitchel que corresponden a tantos recuerdos míos, y esos tres pequeños volúmenes eran los tres tomos de Infierno, el Purgatorio y el Paraíso, vertidos al inglés [...]

WÄ…tpliwe, aby Å›wiat miaÅ' sens; jeszcze bardziej wÄ…tpliwe, aby miaÅ' sens podwójny lub potrójny, zauwa?y niedowiarek. Ja sÄ…dzÄ™, ?e tak wÅ'aÅ›nie jest; (...).

Friendship, you know, is as mysterious as love or any other state of this confusion that we call life. In fact, I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

Voiko se kuolla? Kaikella, mikä kuolee, on ollut jonkinlainen päämäärä, jonkinlainen työ, joka on raastanut sen rikki-

las palabras últimas fueron ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.

If you ask me why I wrote "A thousand tambourines of crystal, wounded the light of daybreak –Mil panderos di cristal, herían la madruga," I will tell you that I saw them in the hands of trees and angels, but I cannot say more: I cannot explain their meaning. And that is how it should be. Through poetry a man more quickly reaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician silently turn away from.