#meanings

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings. ↗

— Henri Bergson

#always #comic #different #each #events

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture. ↗

— David Bohm

#compulsive #conform #constitute #culture #distortion

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings. ↗

— W. E. B. Du Bois

#books #fact #in fact #longer #mastered

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

#change #course #drastically #meanings #minds

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little. ↗

— Stephen Spender

#comprehending #formal #little #master #meanings

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader! ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#author #become #books #could #down

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion. ↗

— Pedro Almodovar

#comic #emotion #feel #film #films

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

— Alfred Adler

#determined #give #meanings #ourselves #situations

Being cryptic is an art unto itself. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#meanings #wisdom #art

Unless followed by the world 'education', liberal has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then a religious, party. The same irresponsible rapacity, the desire to appropriate a word for its 'selling-power', has often done linguistic mischief. It is not easy now to say at all in English what the word conservative would have said if it had not been 'cornered' by politicians. Evangelical, intellectual, rationalist, and temperance have been destroyed in the same way. Sometimes the arrogation is so outrageous that it fails; the Quakers have not killed the word friends. And sometimes so many different people grab at the coveted word for so many different groups or factions that, while it is spoiled for its original purpose, none of the grabbers achieve secure possession. Humanist is an example; it will probably end by being a term of eulogy as vague as gentleman. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#meanings #words #education