Quotes About Meaning

gobo n. the delirium of having spent all day in an aesthetic frame of mind-watching a beautiful movie, taking photos across the city, getting lost in an art museum-which infuses the world with an aura of meaning, until every crack in the wall becomes a commitment to naturalism, and every rainbow swirling in a puddle feels like a choice.

I want to keep the emptiness away, to realize the Sense of what it's like to be alive instead of just existing.

To give your life is one thing; to do it for a gesture is another; but to do it for a gesture you know is meaningless is a desolate trick of fate.

The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn't even bother to respond.

You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn't live by it or for it.

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.

There are no objective values.

The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports.

Viking names included 'desirous of beer', 'squat-wiggle', 'lust-hostage', 'short penis', 'able to fill a bay with fish by magic', 'the man who mixes his drinks' and 'the man without trousers'.

And when a countryman says the cold freezes water, though the word freezing seems to import some action, yet truly it signifies nothing, but the effect, videlicet that water, that was before fluid, is become hard and consistent, without containing any idea of the action whereby it is done.

his principles could not be made to agree with that constitution and order which God had settled in the world

it seems a strange way of understanding a law, which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery.

PETER: But you're 'Alice'. ALICE: As you're 'Peter'... But after all, what's in a name? PETER: What isn't? She understands.

But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend... One day the black will swallow the red.

There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.

The most important thing in life is not happiness but meaning.

In seeking understanding, I am seeking for meaning.

Faith is a creative act. It is through faith that we transform the accidental events of our lives into the signs of our destiny. Happiness is fortuitous but meaning is conferred when chance is transfigured through a rebirth of images.

When people say, 'I don't get art' … that means art is working.

Because the arts are not about what you can just see or sense; they're about discovering what underlies it all—

Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are considered "useless," will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.

We are created for something more serious than just a day-to-day survival.

It'd be funny if one of them was called Gavin. Funny but irrelevant.