Quotes About Meaning

If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?

The question of whether history has a goal is one that falls in the domain of philosophy and rides on the back of logic. But the study of history has a definite goal: the search for truth.

The word bara has no gender," I said. "And the world elohim might be plural. What if the real meaning was, 'In the beginning, she created the gods?

I put it to you, Doctor, that our gods are what good and bad once were before they became categories un human reasoning.

he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is. — But, Dr Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal. 18 —

F.U.B.A.R is a military acronym

As if bad poetry could ever save anyone.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.

All names mean something.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.

I sigh therefore I am . . . In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby's first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover's groan, unhappy lover's lament, miser's whine, crone's croak, illness's stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.

I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born …. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love … your love looks just like hatred.

Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form—or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes.

What is the use of stories that arent even true?