Quotes About Meaning

Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.

There was one theory put forth by a journalist recently. I have a lot of friends that have died prematurely and a lot of friends that have died of natural causes. I've lost a lot of people over the years. This journalist basically recommended to me that God keeps me around because I amuse him.

Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.

I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.

Work is therapy for the soul.

The essential argument in the book, 'Art as Therapy,' is that art enjoys such financial and cultural prestige that it's easy to forget the confusion that persists about what it's really for.

I received many prizes of course before the Nobel Prize and this is probably the last prize I get. But I felt when I see the patient and saying they were saved by the therapy we developed, that is the most moving, and also the time I feel my life has some meaning.

If anyone would have been paying serious attention to my puppet shows, I would have been sent to therapy very young.

I don't do my best work while I'm in therapy. I'm too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I'd rather find images I don't understand. That's what generates the work.

Iconic jobs are interesting to deconstruct through therapy.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

What I do is between me and the Lord, to examine and possibly alter the state of grace in which I live, and thereby the state of grace of anybody who listens.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

I have a profound belief in the power of the Sacraments. I believe that in a Divine way the use of them teaches the teachable their inward meaning and therefore I think we need be in no hurry to attempt to teach new converts all that we think we know about them.

The best movies have one sentence that they're exploring, a thesis, something that people can argue about over dinner afterward.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

And I haven't met too many actors along the way that haven't told me how much the show has meant to them. It's one of the reasons they say they are doing what they're doing, today.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.