Quotes About Meaning

In art, however, we create a realm of the imagination, in which each beginning finds its end, and each fragment is part of a meaningful whole.

The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.

In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs.

P.S. I still dunno if it's art. Go to Hell yourself.

You are one of the few successful persons I know. Me? Why? You know precisely what you are doing and you do it well. But I don't really do much of anything. And of course the quantity means nothing to you, nor the weight others place upon your actions. In my eyes, that makes you a success. By not giving a damn? But I do, you know. Of course you do, of course you do! But it is a matter of style, an awareness of choice—

Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning.

What's truth, anyway? Truth is what you make it.

Would I see everything stripped of meaning, form, content, life, when things had been pushed to a kind of completion?

My sense of Shadow was dulled in this place which seemed in some way the essence of Shadow.

I was tired of looking for sense where there wasn't any.

My foolproof plan might not be proof against this-meaning I was the fool.

The lives of the poor are rich in symbols.

The photographs had made him aware how much the street and the buildings meant to him. Like an extended family that he'd taken for granted and ignored, assuming it would always be there. But buildings and roads and spaces were as fragile as human beings, you had to cherish them while you had them.

To whom can I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought... ?

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.

I have a disease; I see language.

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.

It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.