Quotes About Meaning

It had always irked me that gods never said, "Next Tuesday, Rajit will be struck with boils in his mouth and choke to death." What good was prophecy if you had to live through the events foretold before you could begin to understand them?

I looked up the word politics in the dictionary. It's actually a combination of two words: poli, which means many, and tics, which means bloodsuckers.

Yes, eros and agape are different, but the stifling of the former leads to a distortion of the latter.

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you." This

Dukkha is not the self-inflicted stress of a technology executive; it's the real stuff, the kind of suffering that merits the Pali word's original meaning: brokenness, stuckness.

From inside our turn-of-the-century Italianate home, I watched them standing out on the sidewalk or peering from their car windows. I always wondered what they were looking for. Did they imagine life in the old homes was like a life they dreamed of and didn't have? Did they think the traces of fading graciousness and entitlement that emanated from the aging plaster and hardwood floors endowed the current occupants with lives that were more meaningful than their own?

One black man, overcome by emotion, dropped to his knees, prompting the president to conduct a curbside colloquium on the meaning of emancipation. "Don't kneel to me," said the president. "That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

This horror and all these useless gestures, this grotesque adventure is ours. We must live it. Death is absurd also.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

To live without loving is not really to live.

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.

The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.

If it has been possible to suggest that no event could have a final meaning before history had come to an end one way or another, then any way of giving any kind of sense to an event is a way of putting an end to history.

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.