Quotes About Meaning

You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say? Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Maybe the first time that you know you really care about something is when you think about it not being there,and when you know-you really know-that the emptinessis as much as inside you as outside you.For it falls out,that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it;but being lacked and lost,why,then we rack the value,then we find the virtue that possesion would not show us while it was ours.That's when I knew for the first time that I really did love my sister.

One of the most empowering moments of my life came when I realized that life is a question and how we live it is our answer.

and that's when it hit me: It's all a joke. With the possible exception of geometry, which has too many sharp edges, and health classes, which make you sick, it's all a joke. All of it. At least now. But I've only felt that way for a short time, so I might be wrong.

In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.

It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it.

You go around and you do things and you don't know why you do them, she said. And that's the story of your gender writ large.

Faith is, at heart, the central relationship that gives meaning to our life; we are able to interpret our experiences in light of that relationship. Or as Katherine Dyckman and L. Patrick Carroll put it, To `faith' is to hand over the direction of one's journey to another, to yield up . . . `the illusion of control' to someone who is essentially beyond our control, over whom we have no power (1981:8 9).

A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet's daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one's thoughts, but also into one's daydreams. Language dreams.

In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own.

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.

Like friendship, words sometimes swell, at the dreamer's will, in the loop of a syllable.

Ce qui ne peut être écrit mérite-t-il d'être vécu ?

Among his myriad achievements, perhaps his lasting heritage is a renewal of emphasis on symbol and poetic meaning in fields like architecture that became overwhelmingly concerned with form and structure

We worship beauty, thinking it has innate meaning. Perhaps it is little more than fortunate inheritance and good health. Can we see beyond the shell to the man or woman within?

Love is just a four letter word! (laughter) Because that's what it is for me! I don't know what it means... I mean, love didn't work, whatever the hell that is, in my life. Alone I am. I'm not particularly into self-love either. I'm quite prepared to die. And all the objects of my love slowly trail off.

There are things that a woman sings, and only a woman knows the full meaning. You may sing for men as well as for women, but only a woman knows your full meaning. I am not a feminista. I only think a woman should be true to who she believes herself to be. Or who she wants herself to be. Or who she imagines herself to be. I don't know what I mean, or whether I'm true myself to any of that. I don't think there are many of us who are true to our possibilities.

It was one of those kinds of looks that changes meaning with time and place.

The Reformation may have resulted in a "Protestant work ethic," but this was not due to the pressure to prove one's election by worldly success, as certain social scientists ludicrously maintain. Rather, the work ethic emerged out of an understanding of the meaning of work and the satisfaction and fulfillment that come from ordinary human labor when seen through the light of the doctrine of vocation.

There is one strange irony that I haven't told you. One April afternoon, three weeks before she died, Gilda walked up to me in our living room and said, "I have a title for you, 'Kiss Me Like a Stranger' . . . maybe you can use it some day." I had no idea why she said it or what the title meant; I just thanked her.

Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, "It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up.

that everything, whatever happens, has three meanings.