Quotes About Meaning

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am.

There had to be consequences. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.

They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why.

Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask.

This is the essence of tragedy, To have meant well and made woe, and watch Fate, All stone, approach.

As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God.

2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.

Your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly retire you had a job but not an occupation.

When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.

You who were bewildered by a meaning, whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed—Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving. Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Particularly during one's youth, it is difficult to distinguish trivia from what is worthy.

Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.

Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.

England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works.

Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds.

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.

People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.

We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For

There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot's response to Helen Gardner's book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.

It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion. If we are to understand the nature of artistic meaning, therefore, we must first understand the logic of figurative language.

Philosophy arises, therefore, in two contrasted ways: first, in attempting to complete the 'Why?' of explanation; secondly in attempting to justify the other kinds of 'Why?' — the 'Why?' which looks for a reason, and the 'Why?' which looks for a meaning. Most of the traditional branches of the subject stem from these two attempts, the first of which is hopeless, the second of which is our best source of hope.

Official patronage therefore inevitably favours works that are arcane, excruciating or meaningless over those that have real and lasting appeal.