Quotes About Meaning

why a difference in kind should equate to a difference in significance.

But still: antiracists need to listen more to the enemy. Because antiracism only exists to fight racists; it only has meaning oppositionally. If there were no racists, there would be no antiracists. And the racists say: Jews are not white. The Nazis said it all the time—the project of the Jews, as far as they were concerned, was to undermine the Aryan white races. And the exclusion of Jews from the category of whiteness is still key to present-day white supremacists.

We have to know what's meant

And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.

We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in-and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing-the only work you can do convincingly-is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.

A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator's mission seem so impossible.

The expression "literal meaning," taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.

The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not.

Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.

This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

Life is meaningless, but it also has meaning—or, more accurately, meanings. There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-existence. However, that is only part of the picture. Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, it seems that all things considered non-existence is preferable.

We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die—obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space.

coming into existence, far from ever constituting a net benefit, always constitutes a net harm.

but the meanings hidden in great stories are universal,

No, I cannot believe in nothingness being the destined end of all: that would be too futile a climax to content a dramatist clever enough to have invented Jurgen.

This makes no sense. None of it does. But maybe that's the point. Maybe the things that make the least amount of sense are the things you're supposed to do. I don't know. - I look at him, looking back at me. - But one thing I know: I'm not crazy for feeling this way. They're crazy for trying to stop me. And if it's the last time I ever get to feel joy again, I won't let them have it.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.