The essential meaning of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and abroad.
I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.
The first meaning of ‘cognitive’ for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint.
There is a profound difference between information and meaning.
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
‘Little Night’ has layers of meaning. There’s something enchanted about night. All those heavenly bodies, shooting stars, the crescent moon, celestial phenomenon. Owls fly at night, and first kisses happen. Night is romantic. Alternately, darkness hides the worst of human behavior.
In literature classes, you don’t learn about genes; in physics classes you don’t learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.
I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent – not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.
Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.
And I seemed to discern a power and meaning in the old, which the more impassioned would not allow.
But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.
Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.
I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it’s that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.
Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.
Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street.
If there’s a song that stops meaning anything to me, then I’ll quit playing it.
I’m a bachelor in the old sense of the word, meaning I flirt, I have very many close relationships, but then I come home and like to read my book.
Weigh the meaning and look not at the words.
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Faith is trust in ultimate meaning.
Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that’s still a rare privilege. And gay people deserve more, collectively, than the crumbs of justice.
I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly thrown aside.
Dabbling with Tagore was always scary. It happens with masters, with contemporary poets you know their vibes and their meaning. Tagore was different; his aura and the feel of his language was different.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.
Without wisdom, the future has no meaning, no valuable purpose.
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
I’ve been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do ‘A Cook’s Tour;’ I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn’t already.
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.
Let’s just say that I am aware my style has meaning for some people.
I don’t know what a credit bubble means. I don’t even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don’t think they have any meaning.
The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.
I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.
The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
We made sure that Ian Gwyn Hughes from the media department gave a speech about the anthem. We translated it into English, what the meaning of it is and it is very powerful.
If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
The meaning or value of a thing consists of what it affords.
When you live in New York City, you run up a long list of things you’ve been meaning to do.
The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.
TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act – the first third of the season – second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.
I don’t endorse sex comedies. Even in TV shows, there are many double meaning dialogues and I am not really comfortable doing that.
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
When there are tiers of meaning in an ad it intrigues the audience and they look for it again and again.
It’s just that a lot of songs that are popular right now, they don’t have any meaning.
If God had made a perfect world, it would be a magic trick, not creation, with no meaning or place for us to learn and create. Mankind is not yet ready for a perfect world. We do not know how to appreciate perfection.
It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.
These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They’re the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.
A name is so important in biblical settings that Scripture frequently mentions God Himself changing someone’s name to reflect a new reality. Abram, which means ‘exalted father,’ was changed to Abraham, meaning ‘father of a multitude.’
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’
So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.
The world in general has meaning, deep meaning at times. This cannot be dismissed as a delusion, an artifact of chemicals.
This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom.
I aim to be translucent, so you don’t notice the words, just their meaning. I haven’t much insight into people’s motivations.
No matter what age you are, or what your circumstances might be, you are special, and you still have something unique to offer. Your life, because of who you are, has meaning.
Suddenly life has new meaning to me, there’s beauty up above and things we never take notice of, you wake up suddenly you’re in love.
Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.
In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist’s touch, his personal style, his ‘paw’. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.
A lot of women wrote to me. Some wrote me long letters on the meaning of the circle and about mythology and about motherhood and the significance or the symbolism of the mermaid and the frogs and the turtles.
