Quotes About Meaning

The invention of languages is the foundation.The "stories" were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows' (Letters, 165, p. 219).

Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as big bursts and little bursts. Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

and everybody will have what they never yet have had, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure-- leisure to sit down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean, and really want, and really intend to do with their lives.

Why, one person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one's very own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be interested in, was worth more than all the speeches on platforms and the compliments of chairmen in the world. It was also worth more—Rose couldn't help it, the thought would come—than all the prayers.

Why do anything-- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.

Totta puhuakseni en piittaa paljonkaan: hyvä tarina on hyvä tarina, tuli se mistä tahansa.

How grateful I am to the Lord for giving me such a dear husband and baby. How much life means now—living for them, giving of myself to them, feeling myself needed by them. Of all hopelessly selfish people I should have been the worst had I remained single.

We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old philosophies, and that from them arise most of the old philosophical fights and arguments.

In the rough, a symbol is a sign that stands for something Before a noise, etc., may become a symbol, something must exist for the symbol to symbolize.

the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero

No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.

Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.

The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.

Acaso el último y verdadero sentido de la creación del artista consista en extender un velo sobre el sinsentido de la vida.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Ah, whyShould life all labor be?

Qu'importe de quoi parlent les lévres, lorsqu´e on écoute les coeurs se répondre,

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

In the real world, it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism.