Quotes About Meaning

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.

Understand that the only possession of any value is life.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

The self requires a story.

Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself. That may be. But what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me.

Une vie ne vaut rien, mais rien ne vaut une vie.

Remember this. Hold on to this. This is the only perfection there is, the perfection of helping others. This is the only thing we can do that has any lasting meaning. This is why we're here. To make each other feel safe.

Words make love with one another.

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

Pop, I said, isn't this shit vaulable? Not to me, son.

The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in.... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.

Quand la mort nous regarde calmement dans les yeux, nous nous rendons compte qu'il y a eu dans notre vie quelques heures, de soleil ou de nuit, quelques visages auxquels nous revenons sans cesse, et qu'en fait ce qui nous rendait vivants, c'est les simple espoir de les retrouver...

E po', che dicivano l'antichi che bazzicavano con la sapienzia? Dicivano: Monaci e parrini sentici la missa e stòccaci li rini. Che veniva a significare che i parrini servivano solo per sentirci dire la santa messa, doppo si poteva spezzarci la schina.

Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.

There's nothing essentially romantic about things like roses or jewelry. Romance starts as some blank concept, and then you just fill it in with objects so you have something to point to when you want to make it real.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free, he'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species. An animal carries out its slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand, claims to aspire to the absolute.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count.

But how can I put a name to what it is that I want? How am I to know that I really don't want what I want, or that I really don't want what I don't want? These are intangibles that the moment you name them their meaning evaporates like jellyfish in the sun.

A film in cinema is what in theatre would be realism—and vice versa. In cinema—as in life—the text, the words, are refracted in everything apart from the words themselves. The words mean nothing— words are water.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the link that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count.

El artista no tiene ningún derecho moral para dejarse llevar a un abstracto nivel medio, para hacer que su obra sea más comprensible, más accesible. Esto no acarrearía otra cosa que la decadencia del arte, cuando en realidad esperamos su florecimiento, creemos en las posibilidades potenciales y aún no desarrolladas del artista y también en una elevación de las exigencias del público. O al menos queremos creer en todo ello.

In any case it is perfectly clear that the goal for all art—unless of course it is aimed at the 'consumer', like a saleable commodity—is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question.