Quotes About Meaning

You write a thing down because you're hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion.

Stevie Smith calling Death the only god who must come when he's called tickled you pink, as did the various ways people have said that were it not for suicide they could not go on.

If I were truly talented, as I once imagined I was, then I would have understood long ago that life is just about people.

Now he began to divine that a deeper meaning and a deeper wisdom underlay Our Lord's commandment Thou shalt not kill than merely that which he had been told–God desires not the death of any sinner. Behind the commandment lay also a care for the slayer–the slayer also exposed his soul to many kinds of evil powers, which now found occasion for sudden assaults.

as long as there were still cedar trees and dogs, I reckoned I had a reason to keep going.

literature is but the shadow of good talk

What do we mean when we ask what the point is? Reflection bakes no bread, but then neither does architecture, music, art, history, or literature.

there is a felt gap here-the gap between knowledge and wisdom- that cannot be closed through empirical enquiry. That is, the question of the meaning of life in not reducible to empirical enquiry. This felt gap between knowkedge and wisdom is the very space of critical reflection. In philosophy, but also more generally in cultural life, we need to clip the wings of both scientism and obscurantism and thereby avoid what is worst in both Continental and analytic philosophy.

To utter a word and meaning nothing by it is unworthy of a philosopher. Berkeley

JASON: 'Intended wings.' How depressing. MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons. JASON: No - no, it doesn't. It could mean the wings were 'intended' to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they were defective in some way, these wings, so the pigeons aren't suicidal, not at all, just badly equipped for flying. Like the rest of us.

Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful.

Problém se slovy spo?ívá v tom, že stahují myÅ¡lenky k zemi, pÃ…â"¢ibíjejí je na kÃ…â"¢íž pÃ…â"¢esných význam?. Ale život není o pÃ…â"¢esných významech, spíÅ¡e o jejich odstínech, o náznacích, verzích a rozporech, o propojení lásky a nenávisti, vypo?ítavosti a touhy.

In an era when most bands were about nothing, the Manics were about everything: an eloquent scream, a j'accuse to the entire moribund millennium.

God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.

scripts that rely on semagrams tend to have hundreds or even thousands of signs (Chinese has over 5,000).

It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature's secrets.

Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a mystical tribe attempting to conjure sensible words out of meaningless symbols.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.

A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; so to say it is ambiguous is to assert that it's meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure & outrageousness, to save his existence.

Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.