Quotes About Meaning

If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

A exista e un plagiat.

If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.

De la vida tenemos que hacer un soneto —o ahorcarnos.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?

I seriously ask myself, What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows? Wouldn't it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.

To exist is to profit by our share of unreality, to be quickened by each contact with the void that is within.

Why do men insist on achieving something? Would it not be better if they stood still under the sun in calm and silent immobility? What is there to accomplish? Why so much effort and ambition? Man has forgotten the meaning of silence.

Each of us takes on himself that unit of disaster which is the phenomenon man. And the only meaning time has is to multiply these units, endlessly to enlarge these vertical sufferings which depend upon a nonentity of matter, upon the pride of a given name, and upon a solitude without appeal.

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

The things that we have expressed we believe a little less in. Why? Because they detach themselves from you. In that sense, really the fact of writing is a kind of profanation. Because the things in which you believe fully, from the moment you have said them, they mean less to you.

The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the 'will to live,' in 'idea,' or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our innermost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after the autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Where to go? Where to live? And what to seek in the uproar of a Babylonized planet?

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?", I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Since it is words that bind us to things, we cannot detach ourselves from things unless we first break with words.

Kandinsky maintains that yellow is the color of life... Now we know why this hue so hurts the eyes.

Il semplice fatto di esistere è talmente grave che, a paragone, Dio non è che un mero trastullo.

Everything is unique—and insignificant.