Quotes About Meaning

Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and—at its most extreme—abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd. […] to emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the feeling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.

I knew all the answers then. Where there are no words, knowledge comes through physical acts and through the space through which those acts are made; by permitting each act the space conferred meaning upon it and no further meaning was necessary.

In it's travels, it's meaning is diversified.

But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what the image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but what it is.

Sayg?n bir yaÅŸam ve ölüm için, kavramlar kendi adlar?yla an?lmal?d?r.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

She wasn't sure what he meant by 'surquedry', other than probably meaning he thought she was a lippy bitch

Even in a godless world, rituals are required.

Our healthy shame is essential as the foundation of our spirituality. By reminding us of our essential limitations, our healthy shame lets us know that we are not God. Our healthy shame points us in the direction of some larger meaning. Our healthy shame is the psychological ground of our humility.

The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pinpoint what is interesting to us.

The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, but to live a life without purpose or meaning.

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

This realization is the first of many awakenings that have shaped my understanding of what religion means: Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.

But authentic worship also has depth.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

Sometimes you linger days upon a word, a single, uncontaminated drop of sound; for days it trembles, liquid to the mind, then falls: mere denotation dimming the undertow of language.

What we were after there, in the horn and vellum

Nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creats the impression of order.

God bless the King, I mean the Faith's Defender;God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender;But who Pretender is, or who is King,God bless us all—that's quite another thing.

The best way to prepare for death is to live life to its fullest.