Surreptitious Meaning Quotes

You know what they say. They? ~ Brian Spellman

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it. ~ Noel Coward

They tell me to be quiet
When I'd rather cause a riot
And have everyone screaming
Out their eccentric meaning. ~ Initially NO

No experience is ever wasted. Everything has meaning. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Learning is not a task or a problem-it is a way to be in the world. Man learns as he pursues goals and projects that have meaning for him. ~ Sidney Jourard

We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all it's possibilitiess; otherwise it's just about somebody who did something. Whatever we take away from stories in the way of significance, symbolism, theme, meaning, pretty much anything except character and plot, we discover because our imagination engages with that of the author. Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for thousands of years, yet we can still have this exchange, this dialogue, with her. ~ Thomas C. Foster

Wow, you're quite a handful. You sure your parents didn't deliberately ship you off on that escape pod?'
Much to his surprise, rather than a sarcastic retort his little charge locked huge, brown eyes on his like a frightened doe in the sights of his 30.06 and bit her lip as her eyes filled with tears.
And at that very moment the term 'disarming' took on a whole new meaning and Jenkins knew he was toast. ~ Marcha A. Fox

The song becomes the meaning itself through the vibratory qualities. When we begin to catch the vibratory qualities ... the song begins to sing us ... I don't know anymore if I am finding that song or if I am that song. ~ Jerzy Grotowski

I worry that I upset people without meaning to. I worry that I don't check my privilege enough. I worry about people being imprisoned for crimes they didn't do. I worry about human rights abuses. I worry about prejudice and politics and pollution and the world my children, and their entire generation, are inheriting from us. I worry about all of the species going extinct because of humans. I worry about my carbon footprint. I worry about all of the pain in the world that I am not actively able to stop. I worry about how much I'm wrapped up in myself, which makes me even more wrapped up in myself. ~ Matt Haig

They think there's a meaning to life out there someplace just waiting for them to find it, but there ain't. There's only whatever meaning you make up for yourself. ~ Kevin Kneupper

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness. ~ Katherine Mansfield

When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty. ~ Confucius

Frankl asserts that "the potentialities of life are not indifferent possibilities, but must be seen in the light of meaning and values." Such meaning and values cannot be imposed; each individual must seek out for himself or herself the meaning of each situation and the implications the present moment may have for the future. ~ William Blair Gould

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves ~ Irvin D. Yalom

You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. ~ C. G. Jung

His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us. ~ Thomas Mann

Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth. ~ Sarah Moss

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The danger facing all of us--let me say it again, for one feels it tremendously--is not that we shall make an absolute failure of life, nor that we shall fall into outright viciousness, nor that we shall be terribly unhappy, nor that we shall feel that life has no meaning at all--not these things. The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God--and be content to have it so--that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life--and have really missed life itself. For life without God, to one who has known the richness and joy of life with Him, is unthinkable, impossible. That is what one prays one's friends may be spared--satisfaction with a life that falls short of the best, that has in it no tingle and thrill which come from a friendship with the Father. ~ Phillips Brooks

To build a life you love, do what you love every single day. Make the time for what matters most to you for a more meaningful life. ~ Akiroq Brost

I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person.
So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person's inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows? ~ Carl R. Rogers

If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis. ~ Eric Liu

Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Modern marriage has lost its meaning
consequently it is being abolished. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning. ~ Patrick Ness

We cannot change our memories, but we can change their meaning and the power they have over us. ~ David Seamands

Life is. I am. Anything might happen. And I believe I may invest my life with meaning. The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise. If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and wonders shall never, ever cease. ~ Robert Fulghum

Strength was Caliza taking on the weight of a kingdom without a single complaint. Strength was Kiva's willingness to give up everything she'd ever known to protect someone she loved. Strength was Caylus's curious mind, Auma's unwavering determination, and Ericen's struggle to remain honourable in a kingdom that had forgotten the meaning.
Every day, they fought, and every day, they were strong. And I could do the same. ~ Kalyn Josephson

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading
about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time. ~ Nick Hornby

I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is "love's fire heats water, water cools not love." As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Yet people and things have gone through something, something that did not, indeed, change them but that did (in a manner of speaking) affirm what they, and precisely they, were as individuals, something that did verify and establish
their identity, their durability and continuity. The hammer of events shatters nothing and forges nothing-it merely tries the durability of an already finished product. And the product passes the test. Thus is constituted the artistic and ideological meaning of the Greek romance. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin

You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life. ~ Erwin McManus

As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Why do you write meaningless philosophy?" you asked.
"Because it gives meaning to life," I whispered with deep empathy. ~ Debasish Mridha

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship. ~ Rollo May

The word comfort is from two Latin words meaning "with" and "strong" – He is with us to make us strong. Comfort is not soft, weakening commiseration; it is true, strengthening love. ~ Amy Carmichael

...even though we do not have the wisdom to enumerate the reasons for the behaviour of another person, we can grant that every individual does have his private world of meaning, conceived out of the integrity and dignity of his personality. ~ Virginia M. Axline

Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire! ~ Avijeet Das

Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality, on the other hand, can only increase vegetative tensions. One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts. ~ Wilhelm Reich

You love them all the more for their concern, but wish they'd get it through their heads that there are some people who don't need the constant companionship of other human beings in order to feel that their life has meaning." From "...He Didn't Even Leave a Note... ~ Gary A. Braunbeck

Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

it was the meaning of more than the game of pool, more than the five-by-ten-foot microcosm of ambition and desire. It seemed to him as if all men must know this because it is in every meeting and every act, in the whole gigantic hustle of men's lives. ~ Walter Tevis

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. ~ Albert Camus

Keeping what you have is hard like searching for what you've lost. ~ Auliq Ice

You talking about computer weaknesses?"
"Yes. But also human weaknesses."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning the types of weaknesses that make humans let down their guard. Trust people they shouldn't trust."
"You're talking about manipulating people."
"Yes." Dexter and Lester were staring at each other. "I guess I am. ~ Chris Pavone

Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I've ever read. It said "What is to give light must endure burning." It's by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I've been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it's why we all suffer. It's the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it's amazing beyond words. ~ Damien Echols

Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action. ~ David Hume