Quotes About Meaning

As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, "those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.

What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.

When people are finding meaning in things - beware.

Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.

The reason that that episode is a bore, in my opinion, is that there is no allegory. It is on the nose. It is a fastball down the middle, and it feels preachy. Suddenly, you're not deriving the meaning from the episode, the meaning is clobbering you over the head.

Life without work is unworthy of being lived.

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, "The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech.

The poet of Whit-manesque ambitions must find a way to present something that has as its sole purpose taking things away.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

Writing fixes the evanescence of sound and holds it against death.

Jonson wrote a poem and called his son His best piece of poetrie A lovely line a little loathsome I loved that poem once He said we are lent our sons never take Too much pleasure in what you love

The important thing is not how many years in your life but how much life in your years.

You ain't gonna organize no churches.'" My

Work is not just about economic reward. It is also about purpose and self-respect.

La maggior parte della vita è così monotona che non c'è proprio niente da dirne, e i libri e i discorsi che la descrivono come una cosa interessante sono costretti a calcare la mano,nella speranza di giustificare la propria esistenza.

When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.

Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It's not so much about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself and the experiences along the way. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Time is the stuff life is made of," and how you spend it makes all the difference.

If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.

I will be brief. Not nearly so brief as Salvador Dalí, who gave the world's shortest speech. He said, 'I will be so brief I am already finished' and sat down.

For most of history, organized religions have claimed sovereignty over the meaning of human existence. For their founders and leaders the enigma has been relatively easy to solve. The gods put us on Earth, then they told us how to behave. Why should people around the world continue to believe one fantasy over another out of the more than four thousand that exist on Earth? The answer is tribalism

the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition.