Quotes About Meaning

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Let science tell us what and how. Let religion tell us who and why.

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'

I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science.

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that's where belief lies and art as well.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

[W.H.R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.

Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

The meaning of life is 'the ultimate questioner's vanity.'

It is now clear that science is incapable of ordering life. A life is ordered by values.

Through the ages, man's main concern was life after death. Today, for the first time, we find we must ask questions about whether there will be life before death.

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically', they really mean, 'not really'.

Subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.

Nonbelievers may hear all the notes of science, but without a theistic context and perspective they will not hear the song.

We should seek the greatest value of our action.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.