Quotes About Meaning

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

The tragedy of life, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.

he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

He looked earnestly at me, as if that was important to me.

I put the doped whiskey down where he could reach it, if his hands hadn't been strapped.

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on for a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.

It is something only a few know in their lives. It is a vision of something so clear, so true, it can only be a madness. You see what life is worth, and you know what death means.

The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it's the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

His relevance derives overwhelmingly from the questions he asked and from his insistence that they cannot be easily dispensed with in the ways that people often think. One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions.

Vu iz do a vasser on a zamd? Vu is do a melech on a land? Dos vasser fun oyg iz on zamd. Der melech in kortn iz on land. Where is there water without sand? Where is there a king without land? Tears from the eyes are withoud sand. The king of cards has no land. (p. 72)

Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What's your contribution to the world or your community? Do you live according to your principles? What will your legacy be? What does your life mean? Maybe our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work can be, and how far-reaching our love can be.

Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. Desire for them is in part a desire for a noble destiny, and beauty can seem like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure.

Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers....

Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.