Quotessence
Home / Topics / Meaning Quotes

Meaning Quotes

Browse 1351 quotes about Meaning.

Meaning Quotes

“Qualcosa che ci sfugge deve pur restare... Perche' il potere abbia un oggetto su cui esercitarsi, uno spazio in cui allungare le sue braccia... Finche' so che al mondo c'e' qualcuno che fa dei giochi di prestigio solo per amore del gioco, finche' so che c'e' una donna che ama la lettura per la lettura, posso convincermi che il mondo continua... E ogni sera m'abbandono alla lettura, come quella lontana lettrice sconosciuta.”

PassionPleasureMeaningReading Books
Book:If on a winter's night a traveler
Create image

“It was watching the priestess in that moment, seeing her for what she was— stunning but bloody, gorgeous but mortal, bereft but joyful— that I understood, finally, about love. She had been telling me, but I couldn't see it, couldn't believe it until I saw her staring at the body of the man she'd loved, standing and singing, utterly undiminished by his absence. This was the lesson I couldn't learn even from a lifetime gazing into my own heart, from a million nights fighting Ruc or feeling him move inside me: Love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both. The world was still beautiful—Ela felt that, and as she sang, I felt the music rising inside me finally, in my flesh and mind—the music of joy and all the wonder that cannot last, of joy, not in the having, but in the passage—and I opened my mouth to sing alongside her, to pour into the world that corporeal trembling without which our lives mean nothing, nor our deaths.”

LoveLetting GoEternalSingingAbsenceMeaningImperfectPassage
Book:Skullsworn
Create image

“The temptation to fulfil all desires was, in the past, that of evil; temptation by the devil. Today it is good which presides over that fulfilment, but it is no longer the fulfilment of a desire or an impulse of our own. We no longer aspire to anything; we are aspirated, sucked up, by the void. The logic of distinction is, ultimately, a precious vestige of the bygone time of signs and sign-value, the loss of which, though imperceptible in the equivalence of images, is even more serious than the loss of the real. Prestige, challenge, rivalry, privileges - it was, at bottom, the golden age of symbolic violence, the only antidote to democratic erosion and the great game of equality of opportunity. It is doubtless as absurd to wish to eliminate that violence as any other. Is it better to stop the haemorrhage and live in a state of perpetual transfusion?”

DesireViolenceMeaningDistinctionVoidFufillment
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
Create image

“A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.”

LifeDesirePoetryMeaningDesiresPoetry Quote
Book:What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
Create image

“Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.”

PhilosophyFeelingsScienceReligionEthicsProofDecisionsMeaningFree WillQuestionsSubjectiveDeterminismExperimentScientificObjectiveNobel LaureateFalsifiableFalsifiability
Book:The Nature of Physical Theory
Create image

“My objective is to create my own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are. We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden. It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You have to be a child—incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and I haven’t met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at all.”

HeartChildrenArtUnderstandingEmotionEssenceUniversalCriticsSimplicityClarityMeaningWorldviewAccessibilityImagesBlaseOveranalysisUniversal Appeal
Author:Andrei Tarkovsky
Create image

“And if we were to show up at any college humanities department in urgent search of purpose and meaning, or were to break down in a museum gallery in a quest for forgiveness or charity, we would be swiftly removed and possibly handed over to psychiatric authorities. The intensity of need and the emotional craving that religions once willingly engaged with have not been thought acceptable within the contemporary cultural realm.”

LifeArtReligionCultureLiteratureEmotionSocietyMeaning
Author:Alain de Botton
Create image

“Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.”

EmotionMeaningIndigestionExistential Dread1927Why I Am Not A Christian
Book:Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Create image

“She gasped. “You know what your problem is? You don’t take yourself… or anything… seriously enough!” She sat rigidly, her teeth and her buttocks clenched tight, nostrils flaring with each impassioned breath, tears burning the back of her eyelids. Was she really having this debate with Bruce Koczynski? A man she believed incapable of these intense opinions and complex ideas? She didn’t even know he had the vocabulary. It was utterly disorienting.”

EmotionEnvironmentArchitectureDebateMeaningIdealism
Author:M. A. Clarke Scott
Create image

“Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.”

LifeWritingPurposeTimeLossEmotionCreativityAdvicePerspectivePerceptionMemoryTraumaStorytellingMeaningCreative ProcessWriting ProcessScreenwritingTipsArtistic Process
Author:Charlie Kaufman
Create image

“THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape. When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man. She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street. For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit. She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.”

LoveWisdomHumorInspirationPoetrySexEmotionBeautyKnowledgeNew YorkStressMeaningProseRebirthAstrologyLiterary FictionBlack HistoryValentine S DayBlack AuthorsDeityFoodiesScorpiosWilmington
Book:Remains To Be Seen
Create image

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.”

LanguageHonestyMeaningDelusion
Book:Hyperion
Create image

“If you want to know what makes you happy, imagine your very last day on this earth. Think about who you would wish to spend it with, where you might be and what you might be doing. For me, I would wish to spend it with the ones I love, somewhere not far from Nature, by the ocean, or maybe in a vibrant city, in a street with sights and sounds of people. Perhaps there's a vista of a fountain or a river... and watching the world go by, I'd be writing, completing the last chapter to a final book ...”

LoveLifeWritingHappinessDeathImaginationDreamsCreationMeaningWriters Lives
Author:Suzy Davies
Create image

“What would the differences be between the world in which I existed (however briefly) and a different world where almost everything is exactly the same, except in this parallel universe I never existed? It is all those differences, however minuscule, that make up my existence.”

PhilosophyExistenceIdentityIndividualityMeaningExistentialSelf ReflectionIntrospectiveParallel WorldsCosmic Perspective
Book:If Cats Disappeared from the World
Create image

“Diary, do you know the best part of an ice cream bar? It’s the end part after you’ve eaten most of the bar, where the rectangular base chocolate flake pokes out. You have to tilt your head and bite off the bottom scrap of chocolate. Yeah. That place. I always lick it a few times too. Why is it so interesting? Because it’s definitive...it’s something again. The whole bar is predictable until you reach its finale, where the texture is its own. If people were ice creams, most would slip out of the stick, never deciding to be, never knowing they haven’t decided. We must be our own surface.”

IdentityIndividualityMeaningFinding YourselfUniquenessIce CreamThe Goodbye Song
Book:The Goodbye Song
Create image

“The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.”

IndividualityMeaningCharade
Book:My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror
Create image

“This practice of his allowed him to express a mode of personal identity, however trivial and illusory, as if such a thing could be achieved merely by adorning oneself with a particular item of apparel or even by displaying particular character traits such as a reserved manner or a high degree of intelligence, all and any of which qualities were shared by millions and millions of persons past and present and would continue to be exhibited by millions and millions of persons in the future, making the effort to perpetrate a distinctive sense of an identity apart from other persons or creatures, or even inanimate objects, no more than a ludicrous charade.”

IndividualityMeaningCharade
Author:Thomas Ligotti
Create image

“I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?”

LifePassionWorkEducationCallingMeaningChancesTenure
Author:Richard Russo
Create image