Quotes About Meaning

A change of style is a change of meaning.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief. Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and The mass of men are one. Chaos is not The mass of meaning. It is three or four Ideas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six. In the end, these philosophic assassins pull Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains. The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

It matters, because everything we say Of the past is description without place, a cast Of the imagination, made in sound; And because what we say of the future must portend, Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

The sky would be full of bodies like wood. There would have been cries of the dead And the living would be speaking, As a self that lives on itself.

I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.

The name one gives is inessential. What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by other name would smell as sweet.

Words are symbols representing things and ideas known to us; and these symbols do not and cannot convey the true nature of even ordinary things.

Words! book-words! what are you?

Answer That you are here---that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Nihilists! I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

The desire to retire is an expression of despair. It means that you have lost your rudder and do not know why you are here or where you are going.

God makes you an incredible offer:You can give your life in exchange for the same thing for which Jesus spent His life – people. People last forever. For good or bad, they are eternal. Spend your life helping them prepare for their eternity. Don't give your life to mediocrity. Life is too short and the issues of eternity too significant.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

This likely means the Torah of Deuteronomy, but it is not spelled out. Most spectacularly, there is only one condition spelled out … keep Sabbath!

I intend to focus on the question of truth. That means I do not inquire about facticity-what happened-but what is claimed, what is asserted here about reality.

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

The law is neither more nor less than an elucidation of the demands of love.

The very circumstances of our lives—so constant and so humdrum and routine, and yet the things that truly constitute the will of God for us each day—are also the very things that serve so to distract us, precisely because we are so involved in them, and cause us to lose sight, however momentarily, of this great truth.

We had to learn to look at our daily lives, at everything that crossed our path each day, with the eyes of God; learn to see his estimate of things, places, and above all people, recognize that he had a goal and a purpose in bringing us into contact with these things and these people, and strive always to do that will—his will—every hour of every day in the situations in which he had placed us.