Quotes About Meaning

If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.

The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.

His claim to Mars is lawyers' hogwash; as a lawyer myself I need not respect it.

Call it that if you like. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

I hope he's just a scoundrel . . . because a saint can stir up ten times as much mischief as a scoundrel.

they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

Science fiction means different things to different people. When I make a word do a lot of work like that, said Humpty Dumpty, I always pay it extra—in which case the term science fiction has piled up a lot of expensive overtime.

Everything and anything about a culture can be inferred from the shape of its language—and

If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight—and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?

In a mature society, "civil servant" is semantically equal to "civil master.

A paradox may be paradoctored.

No. 'Grok' is the most important word in the language—and I expect to spend years trying to understand it.

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience.

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

Spanish is so musical that a soap powder commercial in Spanish is more pleasing to the ear than the best free verse in English—the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning.

We don't like anything that is "simple": To us "simple" means dull or dense or stupid. We have forgotten that simplicity is a need in human life: It is the human art of finding meaning and joy in the small, natural, and less dramatic things.

Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.

If it were Hegel , I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?

If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, Who are you? would be to hum the Hammerklavier.

And that reminded me--as everything in the universe does--of Finnegans Wake. Now, I'm sure in an educated audience like this, you're all thoroughly familiar with Finnegans Wake, and I don't have to explain its deep structure or its polylinguistic meanings.

To quote Gurdjieff again, Life is real then only when I am. If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more real, perhaps?

An elementary example: I can give a physicist, or a chemist, a book of poems. After study, the scientist can report back that the book weighs x kilograms, measures y centimeters in thickness, has been printed with ink having a certain chemical formula and bound with glue having another chemical formula etc. But scientific study cannot answer the question, Are these good poems? (Science in fact cannot answer any questions with is or are in them, but not all scientists realize that yet.)

Somehow, in passing from abnormal temperatures to blue luminescence and haloes, we seem to have crossed a line, and, for most readers, skepticism is increasing. I wonder why that is? Is it possible that what I call the New Idol so dominates the modern world that even those who read a subversive book like this are still uneasy about becoming too blasphemous, too heretical?