Quotes About Meaning

The Text is without a source -- the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

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 (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).

language is never innocent.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new films, new items but always the same meaning.

Don't worry. Felix is subtler than he looks. And he's not an assassin." The four vaporized terrorists north of us would probably disagree, I thought.

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE

but words are symbols, and symbols never resonate the same for everyone.

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

if the person did not have anxiety, he or she would also not have freedom. Anxiety demonstrates that values, no matter how beclouded, do exist in the person. Without values there would be only barren despair.

In the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened

Life is not a matter for simple optimism--for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism--for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.

The "stuffed men" are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they "lean together"; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.

Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.

Again, we find in modern art and modern music a language which does not communicate.