Quotes About Relevance

Documents usually describe what we need, but not why we need it.

Stories get their name from how they should be used, not what should be written.

Stories get their name not from how they're supposed to be written, but from how they're supposed to be used.

What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body.

Some things exist only because they're talked about.

When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant

Books no longer have the power they once did.

God's command 'Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature' was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant.

This is what happens. You live past your time of importance and relevance and the world must be given over to the younger ones.

only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.

What we're doing here tonight doesn't matter a bit in the cruel scheme of the world, but we're doing it anyhow.

But look at it this way. Anything is a commodity to someone. In a very large universe, your aunt Gracie's cannonballs may be someone else's favorite underwear.

However, few marriages, he understood, were lasting successes, so that perhaps after all it didn't much matter.

I could make it not matter.

Steinbeck wasn't the thirties and Dickens wasn't the eighteen-hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they're out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap.

A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero

In the real world, it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

Be a child of your times!

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters. It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

Everything means something quite other now.

Why should we imagine that gender matters here? the tutor said. That's actually my question too, Elisabeth said.