Quotes About Meaning

Work was always necessary to survive. Then I decided the goal should be to survive without working. But now I have much more work than I had before. Hunting for freedom, I've found the real prison. but at least it's a prison I've chosen for myself.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

When I first set out to make movies, that's what I thought I was going to do - make movies that mean something. And each movie had its own message, some stronger than others. Even 'X-Men' has its own message of tolerance.

In 'A Confession,' Tolstoy found meaning that he could hold on to, and he lived for another 30 years.

The things that remain matter. Because of them, I can render a plausible life.

Democratic equality and economic opportunity are not the same thing, but the American dream has, for decades, been used as if they are.

The loss of cultural memory is a kind of death, for culture is sustained by memory. We do not have to accept others' narrow understanding of our meanings.

Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.

Sometimes I have a terrible suspicion that the whole tragedy, from first to last, has no meaning.

There is always half a truth in cliche.

It is its absence which defines the importance of a thing.

And only further into relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning had been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.

a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

You can only kill yourself if you're not already dead.

A room of expressionless faces staring blankly at my pain, so devoid of meaning there must be evil intent.

Le propre d'une métaphore, c'est d'être réelle

My story? How can that be relevant? There's not much to tell." "Every person has a story. And every story is important.

They are preparing to go to war, and with so little time to waste, they say what they mean.

Bad art is from no one to no one.