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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Meaning Quotes

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

– Robert Bork

It’s almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around cultural fears, Republicans win the election.

– Rick Perlstein

It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

– Robert Musil

If we focus on the minuses, we go down the spiral. But if we are able to focus on the pluses, we can become stronger and put more meaning into our life.

– Petra Nemcova

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

– Roman Jakobson

We like love – we love love – but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it.

– Richard Flanagan

All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.

– Paul Claudel

When I’m writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself – meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don’t wait, or it’s gone.

– Paul Anka

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

– Salman Rushdie

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn’t even have to mention them out loud to each other.

– Rachel Kushner

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.

– Richard Dawkins

Be Prepared… the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.

– Robert Baden-Powell

It’s a matter of reducing the work to its very simplest possible state, eliminating all of the things that lead away from the guts of the work, the thing the work is really about. Anything that’s there must build towards its over-all organization and meaning.

– Paul Cullen

It’s technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what’s really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

– Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The word ‘excess’ has no meaning for a male.

– Richard Dawkins

If the work is going well and it’s something that has value with some meaning to it, it gives back a lot.

– Richard Gere

The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing.

– Ronnie Barker

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.

– Robin Marantz Henig

For Russians, to whom Pushkin’s poem ‘Eugene Onegin’ is sacred text, the ballet’s story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, ‘Romeo’ and ‘Hamlet’ are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.

– Robert Gottlieb

I don’t know for Justin; he’s always looking for meaning out of his relationships with people. I don’t think he’s as trapped into the drug thing as a lot of the others are.

– Randy Harrison

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.

– Tobias Wolff

Christ is in all, meaning that the divine spark is in all things.

– Tom Shadyac

A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.

– Thurston Moore

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.

– Stephen Cohen

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

– Steve Jobs

Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership’s exquisite sensitivity.

– William Safire

We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.

– Thom Mayne

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

– Susan Isaacs

African-Americans assume I’m named after the notorious Soledad prison or Mount Soledad in California. Latinos want to know if I’m lonely. That doesn’t fit, because I grew up with five siblings, and I have four kids of my own, so I’m not lonely at all, though I do often seek solitude, the actual meaning of my name.

– Soledad O’Brien

Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.

– William Ames

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