Quotes About Meanings

#1. Photographs freed from the scientific bias can, and indeed usually do, have double meanings, implied meanings, unintended meanings, can hint and insinuate, and may even mean the opposite of what they apparently mean.

Peter C Bunnell

#2. Simple words can be given powerful meanings. Wit and wisdom are simple words that speak to truth.

Jim Boyd

#3. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

David Levithan

#4. All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

Mark Kingwell

#5. A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.

Italo Calvino

#6. Dreams and visions are not always intended to be interpreted or analyzed. At times they say exactly what they mean, providing a set of images and meanings to be taken for no more or less than they are.

Hal Zina Bennett

#7. Well, "slithy" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.

Lewis Carroll

#8. A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meaning.

Thomas C. Foster

#9. Turning the pages patiently in search of meanings

W.S. Merwin

#10. Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#11. I don't think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. I wanted to do the opposite - to offer up a life whose meanings can only be perceived through a tangle of desires, confusions, and textural details.

Kevin Brockmeier

#12. Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.

Mary Catherine Bateson

#13. Communicatory inputs from the world can occur through any of the six primary sensory modalities at any time. The important thing is to first develop the capacity to feel the deeper meanings inside any of the sensory modalities, second to seek their meanings, and third to craft congruent responses.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

#14. Sets are fundamental because every mathematical structure,
object or entity can be described as a set. Logic is fundamental because it
allows us to understand the meanings of statements, to deduce information
about mathematical structures and to uncover further structures.

Richard Heath Hammack

#15. Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Kenneth L. Pike

#16. The word good has many meanings ...

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#17. Love has only feelings, don't seek meanings.

Debasish Mridha

#18. Our perception of space alters the space. It is consciousness that finds meanings in all spaces

Tarthang Tulku

#19. There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't three meanings.

Isaac Asimov

#20. Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Oscar Wilde

#21. No poem should be an urn to contain a meaning, but a net to catch what meanings float through the day.

J. D. McClatchy

#22. I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.

Wolfgang Tillmans

#23. For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

Philip Kitcher

#24. Healing must always seek to give voice to suffering, and the greater the range of words and meanings we have at our disposal, the clearer the voice becomes.
Iona Heath in BMJ 2000;320:125 ( 8 January) Review of the book Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age by David Morris

Iona Heath

#25. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Alfred Adler

#26. For now, let's just say that if your API is re-defining the HTTP verbs or if it is assigning new meanings to HTTP status codes or making up its own status codes, it is not RESTful.

George Reese

#27. We do not deceive ourselves that we are engaging in an activity that is anything but debilitating, dangerous, euphoric, kinesthetic, expensive, frivolously essential, economically useless and totally without redeeming social significance. One should not probe for
deeper meanings.

Allen Steck

#28. Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always "falls short of absolute truth.

Eve LaPlante

#29. The whole gun debate needs to be infused with a discussion about manhood. It's frustrating to hear debates about gun rights vs. gun control, and yet very few people say what's hidden in plain sight: It's really a contest of meanings about manhood.

Jackson Katz

#30. Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Marcel Proust

#31. Muslims have different meanings for the same words that we use. They are so convinced of the "truth" of Islam that they do not perceive Jihad/terrorism, or dhimmitude as violence.

Ali Sina

#32. You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.

Mortimer J. Adler

#33. My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets - no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Philip Roth

#34. Everywhere in my house are these little things that have meanings and make me think of great memories.

Nate Berkus

#35. The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives.

Huston Smith

#36. Mr. Sparrow, you will accompany these fine men to the helm and provide us with the bearing to Isla de Muerta. You will then spend the remainder of the voyage contemplating all possible meanings of the phrase 'silent as the grave'. Do I make myself clear?

Rob Kidd

#37. I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.

Lewis Carroll

#38. An educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.

Freeman Tilden

#39. ... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.

Nicholas Gane

#40. And there's no saying what heady potions we won't concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won't imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

Graham Swift

#41. You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Katherine Anne Porter

#42. We would be a few years younger,if every day we meditated for five minutes on the meanings of the word innocence.

Alexandra Vasiliu

#43. When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

Owen Barfield

#44. One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.

Timothy Leary

#45. Now, near the Winter Solstice, it is good to light candles. All the nice meanings of bringing light to the world can be beautiful. But perhaps we are concentrating on lighting the world because we don't know how to light up our own lives.

Ralph Levy

#46. Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

Mason Cooley

#47. I love films like 'Deliverance' where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

Christopher McQuarrie

#48. Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#49. Solitude helps the soul remember that life and
work have two completely different meanings. It reminds
us that we were created for greatness in relationship with
others, not task lists and spreadsheets.

Angela Lynne Craig

#50. When you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities.

Deepak Chopra

#51. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Gregory Maguire

#52. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Oscar Wilde

#53. Words are like bodies; meanings are like souls.

Moses Ibn Ezra

#54. Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.

Karl R. Popper

#55. There was no pretention here, no hidden meanings in the phrases they spoke, no elaborate plans designed to impress the other. Though it had always been easy to spend time with Mike, she suddenly realized that in the whirlwind of the past couple of weeks, she'd almost forgot how much she enjoyed it.

Nicholas Sparks

#56. You know, fingers, they each have different meanings, but my interpretation of them are: promise, love, provocation, direction, and the thumb...well...GOOD LUCK!

Tohru Tagura

#57. People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.

Philip Pullman

#58. When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view

Colin Wilson

#59. [U]ntil feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it - weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality - those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.

Julia Serano

#60. I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

George Edward Woodberry

#61. What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.

James Elkins

#62. In any culture, if information is to maximise in a contextual space, and new meanings be born, the original story has to have substance - there's gotta be gold in them thar hills.

Giles Foden

#63. We invest the moment with meanings it may not necessarily have. We constrain and limit the potential outcomes by imposing external expectations, by imagining and anticipating how others will see things, what they might say...when in reality none of that might matter." ~Jeremy William Carling

Stephanie Laurens

#64. But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.

David Cronenberg

#65. If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

Rose Macaulay

#66. The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.

Ernest Becker

#67. Meanings generating meanings - the process has backed us into a particular corner, a kind of cave, where sunlight seldom enters.

Tarthang Tulku

#68. All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

George Eliot

#69. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

Peter Matthiessen

#70. Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.

Wayne Thiebaud

#71. I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.

Gloria E. Anzaldua

#72. Good software results from the proper organization of components, not from syntactic or semantic restrictions. Meanings

Alexander Stepanov

#73. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now

George Orwell

#74. Happiness! There is no word with more meanings, each person understands it in his own way.

Fernan Caballero

#75. People search for the inner meanings of life instead of living it to the fullest. Life is too beautiful to be analyzed. Living is a spontaneous response meant to be taken in a stride.

Adhish Mazumder

#76. Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others.

Charles R. Swindoll

#77. When you move something, you discover new meanings in it, Kristina thought, watching them.

Molly Gloss

#78. Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

Hilary Putnam

#79. I wanted the song to contain various meanings, and what I wanted in particular was to appeal to the audience with my charms as a man.

Seungri

#80. A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

John Steinbeck

#81. To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

George Herbert Mead

#82. So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category.

Caio Fonseca

#83. Before gathering any data, one must have concepts about the data being gathered. These are conceptual categories, meanings, and relationships that are all pre-empirical. They are purely theoretical. Imagine

Steve Patterson

#84. Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.

Nadia Boulanger

#85. When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.

Pattiann Rogers

#86. What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don't fight war on our soil, we don't have direct experience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give to it.

Robert Dallek

#87. It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.

Terence McKenna

#88. Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.

Jay Parini

#89. The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#90. The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.

Carl Rogers

#91. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

Nicholas Ostler

#92. Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).

Stephen Jay Gould

#93. The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from "controversial" matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life.

John Gresham Machen

#94. we are speaking about cognitive meanings, which cannot be transferred into students as blood is pumped into veins. Learning the meaning of a piece of knowledge requires dialog, exchange, sharing, and sometimes compromise.

Joseph D. Novak

#95. I've spent enough time studying languages to know that almost any phrase can have two meanings

Ally Carter

#96. There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

Donald Barthelme

#97. It was a fire of conscience, and meanings that made up packages of hell which seared into the mind. And what could we do? Supply a variety of survival strategies that made sense of the cacophony of survival?

Paul Valent

#98. Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Graham Greene

#99. That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.

T. S. Eliot

#100. There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings of those terms. Humanism contends that instead of the gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods.

Corliss Lamont