1,900 Quotes About Meaning

The abyss," he said hoarsely. "Everything we do, frantic activities, assignations of meaning to random gestures and grunts, succoring of our organisms and the organisms of those to whom we've developed attachments---it's all designed to distract us from the very abyss in which we formed, the formlessness that fills us. Melba, the infinite emptying of everything ... this is the only process! It doesn't matter if it's reversed. It is changeless!

If he was nothing, or almost nothing, with no idea of where he had come from or where he was going, why he was living or what he was supposed to be doing (the piano only an elusive hint), and if, further, he was buffeted by forces he could not name but which were loneliness, sadness, longing, anger, fear, and spiritual nausea, would he not deeply attend the infinite story of life? Would he not pay the fucking twenty-five cents to get into the cathedral and see the light?

Nur im fluss des Lebens haben die Worte ihre Bedeutung.

Meaning lives in the Goldilocks zone between static truth and dynamic self referential noise.

An antique saying has it that a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war.

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, ‘don’t confuse any of this literary theory with your lives’—how we hadn’t believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.

Forms acquire meaning for us only because we recognize in them the expression of a sentient (fühlend) soul. Spontaneously, we animate (beseelen) every object.

But as soldiers sometimes go on in spite of their own understanding, so do we and as we do, like soldiers, we look upon the dead and wonder at the meaning of it all.

Sometimes a fool says something wise without the intention to do that, and the awareness of having done that.