Quotes About Meaning

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Love is why I came here in the first place.

Whatever meaning 'Annie's Song' had for me on a personal level, there was also a larger context. It could just as easily have been about love for a brother. Or a father. Or a friend. It could just as easily have been a prayer.

I think love and beauty are what life is all about.

There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something.

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings… For communication is not announcing things… Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular… the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.

Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.

No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them.

Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature. The intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition. Thus it varies the arts in ways without end. But its intervention also leads in time to the idea of art as a conscious idea—the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.

There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.

People are looking to have more meaning in their lives. It is a sign the technology community is coming of age.

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

When a metaphor gets big, it is called "tradition"; when it gets bigger, it is called "reality";

That is, by the way, an introductory definition of a parable: a story that never happened but always does—or at least should.

On good days I hope we were formed for a purpose, but there is also a deep throbbing, a grim Celtic warning that life can be either full or futile. And there is no sense to how that will be revealed; we graft meaning on our lives as best we can.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

They say everything in the world is good for something.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,But Shadwell never deviates into sense.Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,Strike through and make a lucid interval;But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,His rising fogs prevail upon the day.

And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.

You may not make sense out of the incomprehensible, but you can make art.

The way of words, of knowing and loving words, is a way to the essence of things, and to the essence of knowing.