Quotes About Meaning

What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.

And all I need now is intellectual intercourse, a soul to dig the hole much deeper

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because , romantic lyrics from but and if . Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

Man is ... essentially a story-telling animal. That means I can only answer the question 'what am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question of 'what story or stories do I find myself a part of?

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man

I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms

Tarih ne bir hapishane ne bir müze ve ne de kendi kendini kutlama vesilesi olacak bir malzemeler kümesidir." s.8

So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.

By asking the question 'Am I happy? ' and via the answer setting out what I mean by happiness, there is a political route that can be taken, by asking another question - 'Can politics deliver happiness, and should it try?'

Ikigai is the overlap of what you want to do, what you ought to do, and what you have to do.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre.

It's not the span of time that counts, but what you do with it. While you humans have been grubbing around the galaxy, looking for a sense of purpose, a meaning to pin on the chain of cosmic accidents that brought you shambling into existence, we have been doing great things. In the span of time that it takes you to sneeze, I can run the equivalent of a year's worth of human consciousness. Imagine all the thinking we have done since our emergence.

What's the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?

our deeds have no higher meaning than the context of the moment in which they occur.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

If I'm not fighting for a good reason, then your personal life starts to get messy, and it's like, 'What am I doing this for?'

I've definitely had the long stretches of time in my personal life where I've felt an intense loneliness and a desperation to feel something real and to have something that truly meant something in my life.

It's a really personal thing for me to write a song.

Everyone hears stories about what it means to be a Liverpool player, but, until you live it personally, you cannot really understand it.

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.

It is odd how learned persons fail to see that new terms and definitions are apt to mean new doubts and litigation.