Quotes About Meaning

The Hanlin named his granddaughter Lustrous Jade, for jade was the fairest of stones and possessed five virtues: charity, for its lustre; rectitude, for its translucence; wisdom, for its purity of sound when struck; equity, for its sharp edges that injure none; courage, for it can be broken but not bent.

American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.

Numbers are the smallest unit of meaning I know. Words are the next largest unit of meaning, and in spite of the confusion they often bring, I admire their complexities. Words are almost as interesting as numbers. But it is safer not to use words unless you have to.

On and on we wander in these pages--and we never reach the point because, happily, there is no point to reach.

to Ramona, because it was

Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity

It is easy to overlook the thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point.We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with.

In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care

disturb, perturb. They can often be used interchangeably, but generally the first is better applied to physical agitation, the second to mental agitation.

untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?

His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So

Our word "salary" comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy.

needless to say is a harmless enough expression, but it often draws attention to the fact that you really didn't need to say it.

They simply exist, Attenborough adds, testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.

In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento può trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a sproposito: «Il diavolo può citare le Sacre Scritture per i propri fini».)

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.

Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule.

polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.

camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning "to blow smoke up someone's nose," a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French)

Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: "Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church." It doesn't make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.

as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

meat was any food (the sense is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).

But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.

the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.