Quotes About Meaning

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Our age has need of violence, he writes. And he is violence.

I can only connect deeply or not at all.

I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Pure love, pure friendship—these are ideals. These may exist now and then, and they are beautiful things to behold. But they are not goals. They are phenomenal and accidental.

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts.

Every disconnection is death.

I thought of you again while reading The Brothers Karamazov (The Sensualists). Everything I read now has a different meaning, a terrible meaning; the way I read Dostoevsky anyway is not reading, it is actual passionate experience, as when I read you.

The inner and poetic illumination of his life came from me.

We write to taste life twice

I realized that for me it is only and always the "literary" appeal that people and places make. The reality is void of interest. Flat.

I never saw as clearly as with Artaud what the meaning of poetry is: it is an abstraction, to match allegorical patterns.

I thought how much this meant to me, and that it was what I really felt about D. H. Lawrence, and that it was the darkness which attracted me . . . don't you think it ‹ so about Lawrence?

He prizes the mattresses even more, though they have big holes in them, because of sentimental reasons.

Can you read this ink, made of distilled Andalusian blood?

To love anything, to appreciate anything, one has to live with it. Otherwise it has no meaning, no beauty.

The dream then, instead of being something apart from reality, a private world of fantasy or imagination, is actually an essential part of our reality which can be shared and communicated by means of imagery.

Every line is pregnant with meaning and however much the meaning is ransacked, the riddle will remain because only you can explain it, and this riddle is your last triumph—you will never reveal it.

I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible.

myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.

Those who think of their house as only a 'machine to live in' should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.

The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is.