Cultural Meaning Quotes

You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems. ~ Chimene Suleyman

It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole. ~ Oliver Harris

It seems far simpler to go ahead and say that the epic is a fantastic myth, that happens to be true of the material Universe, that other myths are true in terms of their cultural meaning, and that there's absolutely no problem with holding more than one story, just as there's no problem with viewing the sunset in terms of planetary rotation and spectra and nuclear fusions one moment and as visual splendor the next. ~ Ursula Goodenough

The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It's about our beliefs and expectations. It's about the cultural meaning of a treatment. ~ Ben Goldacre

Karma waits on the doorstep, meaning that a person may try to walk away from past actions, but like a dog sleeping by the door until its master returns, Karma can be endlessly patient. Eventually the universe will insist on redressing the balance of wrong with right. ~ Deepak Chopra

Those who read the Scriptures as magnificent literature, breath-taking poetry, or history and overlook the story of salvation miss the Bible's real meaning and message. ~ Billy Graham

The greatest number of those who share [John Thomas] Perceval's concerns are the people who have more or less recovered from psychotic episodes, and remain haunted by a compulsion to find the essential meaning and importance of the extraordinary events through which they have lived, and may live through again. For them, this is not simply a scholastic concern, it is felt as an urgent opportunity for self-discovery. ~ Edward M. Podvoll

Historically, the Germans had a habit of associating the names of objects with the sounds they made. After bell makers-turned-cannon-makers learned that by closing off the mouth of the cannon before lighting the fuse, the entire cannon could be made to explode, the device they invented became known as the 'bum' (for boom!). In keeping with this tradition, the first one-thousand-pound bomb was dubbed 'ein laussen bum' (meaning, "a loud boom"). After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they called the fission device 'ein grossen laussen bum' (or, "a big loud boom"). The next obvious step was the fusion, or H-bomb, which was pronounced 'ein grossen laussen bum all ist kaput! ~ Charles Pellegrino

The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience. ~ Eric Kandel

Activities such as chanting, bowing, and sitting in zazen are not at all wasted, even when done merely formally, for even this superficial encounter with the Dharma will have some wholesome outcome at a later time. However, it must be said in the most unambiguous terms that this is not real Zen. To follow the Dharma involves a complete reorientation of one's life in such a way that one's activities are manifestations of, and are filled with, a deeper meaning. If it were not otherwise, and merely sitting in zazen were enough, every frog in the pond would be enlightened, as one Zen master said. Dōgen Zenji himself said that one must practice Zen with the attitude of a person trying to extinguish a fire in his hair. That is, Zen must be practiced with an attitude of single-minded urgency. ~ Francis Harold Cook

Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature ~ Niels Bohr

Moses questions God about death

Moses asks God the most basic question, "You create us; then you kill us. "Why"

God says, I understand the purpose within your question; therefore I'll answer.

You want to know the meaning of phenomenal duration, so you can teach others

and help their souls unfold. Anyone who asks this question has some of the answer.

Sow seed corn, Moses, and you will experience the purpose of taking a form. Moses

plants and tends the crop; when the ears have ripened to the shape of their beauty,

he brings out to the field his blade and sharpening stone. The unseen voice comes,

Why did you work to bring the corn to perfection only now to chop it down? "Lord,

it is the winnowing time when we separate the corn grains we use for food from the straw

we use for bedding and fodder. They must be stored in different cribs in the barn."

Where did you learn this threshing-floor work? "You gave me discernment." Do you

not feel that I should have a similar discernment in the planting and harvesting

of forms that I do? So creation has a purpose. God has said, I was

a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known. That desire is part of manifestation. ~ Rumi

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whilst with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. ~ Henry James

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era. ~ David Hockney

As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future. ~ Carl Sagan

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. ~ Pablo Picasso

The fruit of the Tree of Life is a blessing to us only after we have experienced the challenges of life. It teaches us that those experiences which seem to be the worst experiences of life are transformed into the greatest blessings of our lives. That which rips our hearts out of our chests and weakens our knees to the point of collapse is that which will taste the sweetest after we have passed through it. There is no way around this life. We must go through it. The challenges of life make us who and what we are. All of these things shall be for our experience and for our good (D&C 122:7) - but only in the perspective of looking back on the life that we could not fully see before passing through it. We can only give meaning to those experiences by allowing them to make us who we choose to be as we pass through life - until they become the sweetest and most desirable experiences of our lives. ~ Blake T. Ostler

Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion.

Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolade ~ Edward W. Said

The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything
love, convictions, faith, history
no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter. ~ Milan Kundera

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling. ~ Dorothy Allison

Carved on the temple [at Delphi] were the exhortations "Know yourself" and "Nothing too much," mottoes with a similar meaning: You are only human, so don't try more than you are able (or you will pay the price). A recurring theme in Greek myth is the man or woman who loses sight of human limitations and acts arrogantly and with violence, as if immortal. And pays a terrible price. ~ Barry B. Powell

Share the heart of the Earth with humanity. Meaning mother earth and earth sprit. ~ Ilchi Lee

She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let me come with you," and he laughed. He meant yes or no - either perhaps. But it was not his meaning - it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her ... ~ Virginia Woolf

If you make something good, eventually the audience will be there, eventually there will be something on the Internet that is a cultural phenomenon that's not available anywhere else, that's not available on television broadcasts, that's not on cable, it's only on some Web site. And the world will find it. And when that happens, it will be what the 'kiss' was to the theatrical movie business, 5,000 years ago or whenever it was. ~ Michael Eisner

Black college-educated people got to where they are on the backs of domestic help, meaning their parents and grandparents. So people should not forget how they got to where they are. ~ Esther Rolle

The minority must have involvement in society. You can have different cultural practices that you accept. But if you are going to adopt democracy in government, then the government itself must allow the minority to be heard. ~ Sheila Jackson Lee

Well, first of all," he began, "I really…I really like you." He looked into my eyes in a seeming effort to transmit the true meaning of each word straight into my psyche. All muscle tone disappeared from my body.
Marlboro Man was so willing to put himself out there, so unafraid to put forth his true feelings. I simply wasn't used to this. I was used to head games, tactics, apathy, aloofness. When it came to love and romance, I'd developed a rock-solid tolerance for mediocrity. And here, in two short weeks, Marlboro Man had blown it all to kingdom come.
There was nothing mediocre about Marlboro Man.
He had more to say; he didn't even pause to wait for a response. That, in his universe, was what a real man did.
"And…" He hesitated.
I listened. His voice was serious. Focused.
"And I just flat don't want you to leave," he declared, holding me close, resting his chin on my cheek, speaking directly into my ear.
I paused. Took a breath. "Well--" I began.
He interrupted. "I know we've just been doing this for two weeks, and I know you've already made your plans, and I know we don't know what the future holds, but…" He looked at me and cupped my face in his hand, his other hand on my arm.
"I know," I agreed, trying to muster some trite response. "I--"
He broke in again. He had some things to say. "If I didn't have the ranch, it'd be one thing," he said. My pulse quickened. "But I…my life is here."
"I know," I said again. "I wouldn ~ Ree Drummond

Sports are one of the main cultural activities on the face of the earth. ~ Jack Kent Cooke

There's a meaning behind blank pages, too. ~ Beth Revis

You can never escape future. It's the only way to living. ~ Suyasha Subedi

During the inevitable times when you feel like your work has no meaning, find meaning at home. If you need something more to feel creative or need extra cash, then moonlight: start dream projects after work hours. At some point in time, a successful side project can become your main project and you'll be fortunate enough to make your work and your dreams become one. || You should always have meaning outside the workplace. Work to support your lifestyle - don't live to support your work. ~ Richie Norton

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the "developed" and the latter as the "developing" world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of "development" are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of "development"? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more "developed" than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter? ~ Vinoth Ramachandra

Never in our history have we been headed at such breakneck speed toward our own financial, political and cultural destruction. One can only pray that before it's too late, enough Democrats will come to their senses and help get this freight train under control. ~ David Limbaugh

It is better to live in a world of poetic meaning rather than hardcore reality. ~ Mark Gonzales

Leaders have always needed to understand human nature and personality differences to be successful in business--that's nothing new. What's new is the requirement for twenty-first century leaders to be prepared to understand a wider, richer array of work styles than ever before and to be able to determine what aspects of an interaction are simply a result of personality and which are a result of differences in cultural perspective. ~ Erin Meyer

The people like me, finally, after years and years of agitation, made deeply moving and eloquent speeches against the wrongness of your domination over us, and then finally, after the mutilated bodies of you, your wife, and your children were found in your beautiful and spacious bungalow at the edge of your rubber plantation - found by one of your many house servants (none of it was ever yours; it was never, ever yours) - you say to me, "Well, I wash my hands of all of you, I am leaving now," and you leave, and from afar you watch as we do to ourselves the very things you used to do to us. And you might feel that there was more to you than that, you might feel that you had understood the meaning of the Age of Enlightenment (though, as far as I can see, it had done you very little good); you loved knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes, and in both of these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own). But then again, perhaps as you observe the debacle in which I now exist, the utter ruin that I say is my life, perhaps you are remembering that you had always felt people like me cannot run things, people like me will never grasp the idea of Gross National Product, people like me will never be able to take command of the thing the most simpleminded among you can master, people like me will never understand the notion of rule by law, people like me cannot really think in abstractions, people like me cannot be objectiv ~ Jamiaca Kincaid

The Fourth Industrial Revolution can compromise humanity's traditional sources of meaning - work, community, family, and identity - or it can lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours. ~ Klaus Schwab

Postmodern critics argue, with some justification, that travel and tourism often have the exact opposite effect, transforming the experience into an exploitative commercial affair - a kind of voyeuristic form of entertainment in which the native population and their culture becomes a purchasable commodity to satisfy hedonistic pursuits. The relationship between tourist and native is reduced to a kind of neocolonial "experiential commerce." [...] ~ Jermy Rifkin

I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine. ~ Anne Lamott

Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival? ~ Theodore Bikel

Facing death calmly is praiseworthy only if one faces it alone. Death together is no longer death, even for unbelievers. The source of sorrows lies not in leaving life, but in leaving that which gives it meaning. When love is our whole life, what difference is there between living together and dying together ? ~ Raymond Radiguet

In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ← . Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is "the year above" ↑ and next year is "the year below" ↓. The day before yesterday is the day "in front" ↑ and the day after tomorrow is the day "behind" ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around... ~ Madeleine Thien

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair. ~ George Will

Do things without meaning, and you become entangled in your fate. ~ Kendra E. Ardnek

My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past. ~ Terence McKenna

Breathing is not the process of being filled
and emptied: breathing is the act
of actually making love to the whole world,
which is to say the world is
your lover, which is to say love the whole
world, in all sweaty folds
and scabbed pockmarks, which is to say
love your dirty corners, your
stalk-like legs and barrel hips, love all
the no and the no and the no
that brought you rigth here, to this moment
and love the yes. The yes:
the breath that found its way to you, built
a home in your blood cells,
changed itself to better suit you and for it,
tonight, you say: I was made to
breathe and move and give, which is to say love.
Love. I was made to love. ~ Sierra DeMulder

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. ~ Viktor E. Frankl