Quotes About Meaning

He wished he understood women better. It was a well-known fact that they did not mean half of what they said. But which half did they mean?

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

El hombre no es nada, la obra lo es todo.

Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?' 'What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored, you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?' 'For my education, Holmes.' 'Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.

mystery," I remarked. "What do you imagine that it means?" "I have no data yet. It is a capital

You mean the retired sergeant of Marines," said Sherlock Holmes.

The first object of a novelist, is to tell a tale. If he has no story to tell, what is he there for? Possibly he has something to say which is worth saying, but he should say it in another form.

Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some little use," he remarked. "'L'homme c'est rien—l'oeuvre c'est tout,' as Gustave Flaubert wrote to Georges Sand.

a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean?

Sentimentality, he reflected, was an aid and comfort to the opponents of progress.

We tend to think of dangers and uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life, or irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world. I suggest the contrary: that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life. In fact, as we shall come to understand, they make life matter. They define what it means to be human.

If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.

En la ecuación social, el valor de una sola vida es cero; en la ecuación cósmica, es infinito.

Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself.

Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.

It was in my twenties that I felt old, that was when time was an abrasive wheel grinding me down. But it was not so much death I feared as insignificance.

it is an allegory of our times.

Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world—the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you? What must I do to you? I ought to tear the tongue out of your mouth, what must I do?

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling, of taking the wrong things seriously.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I'd rather remain silent