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.
I think it’s important to get your surroundings as well as yourself into a positive state – meaning surround yourself with positive people, not the kind who are negative and jealous of everything you do.
But even in the Christian religion, much of its real meaning is hidden by words that are misleading and symbols that but few understand.
If I were doing something that the Bible condemns, I have two choices. I can straighten up my act, or I can somehow distort and twist and change the meaning of the Bible.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.
I won’t do roles that are dirty, full of double meaning dialogues and vulgar gestures. Though such roles had made me a star, my conscience was against doing such scenes.
The modern meaning of life’s end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
Obama wants people, as many people as he can get, covered by the government, exchanges, however you want to phrase it, and the more the better, and the sooner, the better, making it impossible to take it away. Meaning, making it impossible to repeal Obamacare.
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
I’m not a pop song lyric writer. I can’t just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
The true meaning of feminism is this: to use your strong womanly image to gain strong results in society.
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
Up to the 20th century, we can say that this whole period was an Earth epoch, ‘Earth’ meaning the riches of the earth, simple physical work. That is why there were wars, the movement of frontiers, war over riches.
What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, ‘If you’ve never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you’re not really an intellectual.’
Music is the biggest tool of revolution – the best way to reach out to the youth and involve them. If you can’t contribute to the world with your art, I don’t see the meaning of life.
I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
I think with ‘Skinwalkers,’ the success of it spoke for itself. Meaning a lot of people wanted to see something new on television.
The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
Muslims must speak out and explain who they are, what they believe in, what they stand for, what is the meaning of their life. They must have the courage to denounce what is said and done by certain Muslims in the name of their religion.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
I don’t want to put meaning on what I do because I don’t know what it is.
I used to think of ‘alternative rock’ as a radio format, kind of the way ‘indie rock’ used to have more meaning. But it means different things depending on where you are or what country you’re in.
The right to a quality education is, I believe, the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right, the values of liberty, justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind.
Art historians agree that Da Vinci’s paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret… a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.
People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that’s something totally different from the slow way you read something if it’s a tune; which to me a poem has to be.
I think things can have more than one meaning and still connect with people. There’s a lot of meaning to the title ‘Music For People’ and they’re all true and they’re all accurate.
The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word ‘Arya,’ meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history.
Eccentric doesn’t bother me. ‘Eccentric’ being a poetic interpretation of a mathematical term meaning something that doesn’t follow the lines – that’s okay.
In the Freudian age, parents say to their children, ‘Don’t be defensive,’ meaning, ‘You have no argument,’ but I was born in the age of Rommel, when defense was considered an honorable thing.
‘Think simple’ as my old master used to say – meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Placing too much emphasis on a yes/no diagnosis, meaning you either have a disease or you don’t, can lead even the most well-meaning physicians to miss underlying causes and early warning signs of illness.
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.
I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.
All of my high school male teachers were WWII and/or Korean War veterans. They taught my brothers and me the value of service to our country and reinforced what our dad had shown us about the meaning of service.
My failure to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles is the direct result of my refusal to die to my natural proclivity toward attaining my own freedom, meaning, value, worth, and righteousness – not believing that, by virtue of my Spirit – wrought union with Christ, everything I need, I already possess.
Everyone’s just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it’s a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.
The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.
I think it’s a part of us as human beings that we search outside of ourselves for meaning.
You need to be able to find joy in something that requires so much of yourself. I have to have that deeper meaning in my work and in my everyday life.
It’s something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.
The Cube can seem alive as it heats up in your hand. The fact that each face of the Cube is made of three layers of three blocks has an important meaning.
I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
I’m constantly investigating nature – nature, meaning everything.
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.
I chose to camouflage my body into the environment because this way, people will pay more attention to the background’s social property, and the meaning of my body disappeared in this environment as an individual.
The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.
