Quotes About Meaning

Let us bind love with duty; for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.' So we bound ourselves.

Let the music which can take the possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more - what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its absence?

I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.

But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

But it is really impossible to decide this question by a glance at his person; the lines and lights of the human countenance are like other symbols,–not always easy to read without a key. On an a priori view of Wakem's aquiline nose, which offended Mr. Tulliver, there was not more rascality than in the shape of his stiff shirt-collar, though this too along with his nose, might have become fraught with damnatory meaning when once the rascality was ascertained.

It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

The speech of flowers excels the flowers of speech.

Ancient writers sometimes meant what they said and occasionally even knew what they were talking about.

What is meaningful are not the words, the mere sound sequences spoken or letter sequences on a page, but the conceptual content that the words evoke. Meanings are thus in people's minds, not in the words on the page.

There is no Chomskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context, perception, emotion, memory, attention, action, and the dynamic nature of communication. Moreover, human language is not a totally genetic innovation. Rather, central aspects of language arise evolutionarily from sensory, motor, and other neural systems that are present in lower animals.

To get a sense of how equality is contested in politics, consider the constant struggle between liberals and conservatives over what equality means: equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Conservatives

Here we find a power of metaphor that we have not previously discussed, the power of revelation. This is the power that metaphor has to reveal comprehensive hidden meanings to us, to allow us to find meanings be- yond the surface, to interpret texts as wholes, and to make sense of patterns of events.

Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance. Remember, you can only understand what the frames in your brain allow you to understand. If the facts don't fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled.

At issue is what freedom is supposed to mean, what democracy is supposed to mean, and what personhood is supposed to be.

What we have here is an image-mapping based on structure—in this case, struc- ture that is in part metaphorically imposed. When such a mapping exists between the structure of a sentence and the structure of the meaning or the image that the sentence conveys, the mapping is called "iconic.

Iconicity provides an extra layer of metaphorical structure to the poem.

It gets quite difficult for me when I listen to pop music. I don't often understand the words, but when someone translates them to me, I think, 'What is this song representing? That women are just there to be treated like objects?'

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip.

Sometimes, I wonder what I'm doing here.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.

I'm kind of concerned about 'Ego & Hubris' because I'm thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they'll wonder, 'Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?'