Top 1200 Symbolic Meaning Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

Clothes are incredibly symbolic.

I draw things on the paper very freely but believing there is meaning to them already. There is already meaning in the colors, I don't need to be guided by words. I draw them and the meaning comes after. Every time we would start a new sequence we would change everything.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

What is the meaning of life? It is too great a phenomenon to fit into any meaning.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

I started my professional life as a philosopher of language and for several years took the orthodox line that meaning is an essentially linguistic phenomenon. Whether as a result of simply listening to everyday talk about meaning, or reading books of anthropology, sociology and art history, it dawned on me that there is nothing at all privileged or central about linguistic meaning.

Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

The world in general has meaning, deep meaning at times. This cannot be dismissed as a delusion, an artifact of chemicals.

People wonder why there seems to be no meaning in life. Meaning does not exist a priori. There is no meaning existing in life; one has to create it. Only if you create it will you discover it. It has to be invented first. It is not lying there like a rock, it has to be created like a song. It is not a thing, it is significance that you bring through your consciousness.

Politics: Poli a Latin word meaning many and tics meaning bloodsucking creatures.

Meaning is man-created. And because you constantly look for meaning, you start to feel meaninglessness.

Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge.

By stripping down an image to essential meaning, an artist can simplify that meaning.

"I seek the meaning of existence," said the stranger. "You are of course assuming," said the Master, "that existence has a meaning." "Doesn't it?" "When you experience existence as it is - not as you think it is you will discover that your question has no meaning," said the Master.

But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The way of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning--the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life--a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.

There is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning - if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment.

Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now.

Man creates what he is, man creates himself. The meaning has to be created. You have to sing your meaning, you have to dance your meaning, you have to paint your meaning, you have to live it. Through living, it will arise; through dancing, it will start penetrating your being. Through singing, it will come to you. It is not like a rock just lying there to be found, it has to bloom in your being.

The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.

For many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything language-like, can't intelligibly be said to have meaning. An encouraging development in the last couple of decades is a return by philosophers to addressing - as nearly all people do at some time or another - the question of life's meaning.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying.

It is the experience of living that is important, not searching for meaning. We bring meaning by how we love the world.

Great companies make meaning. A company has a name, but its people give it meaning.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.

If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.

You’ve never reacted to someone else. You project meaning onto nothing. And you react to the meaning you’ve projected

As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning but to charge the air so that meaning can occur.

The task is not to search for meaning, but to bring meaning to every situation you are in.

Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries. Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.

You dare your Yes - and experience a meaning...You repeat your Yes - and all things acquire a meaning...When everything has a meaning, how can you live anything but a YES.

The information that was contained in a cathedral was based upon a common culture - a common Christian culture - and the elements were chosen for a common symbolic meaning. Someone who knew everything that was represented in a cathedral had a sort of encyclopedia - you can indeed call it that - but it was a selective encyclopedia, like encyclopedias back when they were books and the people writing them were supposed to be specialists in their field. I think today the problem is that people don't know how to choose between different kinds of information.

The meaning of freedom is in the U.S. Constitution. Republicans want to live by the document's original meaning.

What has interested me all along is not the pronouncement of meaning but pointing toward the way meaning is formed.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

There is no use in one person attempting to tell another what the meaning of life is. It involves too intimate an awareness. A major part of the meaning of life is contained in the very discovering of it. It is an ongoing experience of growth that involves a deepening contact with reality. To speak as though it were an objective knowledge, like the date of the war of 1812, misses the point altogether. The meaning of life is indeed objective when it is reached, but the way to it is by a path of subjectivities. . . . The meaning of life cannot be told; it has to happen to a person.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

The sticker has no meaning, but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning.

In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.

Objects do not have meaning. But if an object is thoughtful we project meaning onto it in daily life.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

A fact was the hard outer cover of meaning, and meaning was the soft living stuff inside a fact. Fact and meaning were the driving cogs of living. If the gear of fact drove the gear of meaning, then they revolved in opposite directions, but put the gear of fantasy between the two and they both revolved in the same direction. Fantasy was and is important; it leads to heaven knows where, but follow it and see. Sometimes it pays off.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it.

All our knowledge is symbolic.

Everything on my body has a meaning. I don't do art just because. It does look cool but it also has a meaning.