In the Bible there are three distinctive meanings of grace; It means the mercy and active love of God; It means the winsome attractiveness of God; It means the strength of God to overcome.
The artist in all societies has traditionally been a kind of barometer, more sensitive to nuances and changes than others, because he is more deeply immersed in his culture and more interested in its meanings.
When you think about the concept of infertility, for example, it's not just medical; it's a repository of so many personal and societal meanings - religious, legal, sexual - encompassing mortality and sin and family and eternity.
We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
This was always the problem with my mother and me, I suddenly realized. There were so many things we thought we agreed on, but anythign can have two meanings. Like sides of a coin, it just matters how it falls.
God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.
It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words. ” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.
Every good work should have at least ten meanings.
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations. " But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations.
Humanism has many meanings, but what attracts me about it is that it encourages men and women to take a broad view of situations and to think about them from on-the-ground perspectives rather than through theoretical and conceptual lenses.
The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meanings. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
I'm a sucker for double meanings in titles.
Meanings come not from events themselves, but from what we bring to them.